>> What do I think?  I hate it.  [...]
> Oh, stop with the threats.  This should be a discussion, not a fight.

Point taken.  (I think I actually meant the "threat" as an indicator of
just how strongly I hate it, but I did phrase it badly.)

> There is no reason you can't still use /etc/rc.local -- just have
> that called from one of the ``startup'' scripts.  You don't need to
> [lose] what we have to make things, imho, better.

I'm not sure.  What exactly is being proposed here?  As far as I can
see, SysV-style inits differ in three ways from the BSD kind:

- SysV has an /etc/inittab driving file; BSD init has no driving file
   for startup and shutdown (it does have /etc/ttys for tty lines).

- SysV has run-levels (which really do nothing but select fragments of
   /etc/inittab to be executed); BSD init has, effectively, three
   run-levels wired in: down, not running stuff from /etc/ttys
   ("single-user"), and running stuff from /etc/ttys ("multi-user").

- SysV init knows nothing of startup or shutdown scripts, letting those
   be handled by inittab entries; BSD perforce teaches init about
   /etc/rc for startup.

Thinking about this, and taking the philosophy of making tools as small
as possible, each doing as little as possible, I think the right way to
proceed would be to divorce running gettys from administering startup
and shutdown.  One could perhaps make a case for splitting reaping
orphaned processes off from the others, but I see no reason one of the
above two couldn't handle that; they both need to handle process
waiting and reaping anyway.

I would then have init, the traditional process 1, know nothing of
run-levels; all it should know is "up" and "down".  Single-user versus
multi-user should be handled by shell scripts; most args to init should
be passed to the startup shell script, and could drive its decision to
run a sh on the console versus running the getty spawner, the one
that's driven by /etc/ttys.  Indeed, one could probably do this with a
current NetBSD system by replacing /sbin/init with a shell script.  (I
know this - replacing init with a shell script - works under SunOS 3.5;
I see no reason it wouldn't work under NetBSD, but I haven't tried it.)

> I would not [lose] the old method, but surely you can see the
> advantage of having seperate files...

I can see some advantages.  I can also see some disadvantages.

> I would rather have commercial apps munge their own files, NOT mine.

Well, I've already ranted about commercial apps in the past, so I'll
confine myself to noting that I don't trust them to restrict themselves
to their own files _regardless_ of what style of administration one
does.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu