Ted Lemon writes:
> > OK, so what's _wrong_ with it?
> 
> It's a pain in the butt to write an install script that reliably puts
> the startup code for your package in the right part of /etc/rc.local.
> Actually, it's probably impossible.   The problem being that
> /etc/rc.local is partially human-hacked and partially machine-hacked.
> 
> However, /etc/init.d just makes things really easy for the machine in
> some ways, fails to solve the ordering problem, and makes things
> really unpleasant for humans.

Some (possibly controversial) comments:

1) I think that everyone agrees that it would be better if packages
   could just drop an initialization file into the "right place" and
   have the "right thing" happen -- i.e. that the notion of an rc.d
   isn't so bad, but that it doesn't by itself solve some problems.
2) I think that people generally agree that run levels aren't
   something we want in NetBSD.
3) I think that people generally agree that people want flexibility,
   so it is better if the rc.d style thing gets invoked by rc via a
   shell mechanism and is not built in to init -- ditto that people
   aren't really in to shutdown scripts.
4) I think that people generally agree that we need a better mechanism
   to solve the ordering problem for scripts -- you really want to be
   able to say "start this thing after dns and nfs are up", etc.

4) Is the only problem that I think is hard, and I believe that by
having an explicit dependency list in each script file, we can
probably have some code produce an ordering based on dependencies
rather than trying to do this by kludges like putting numbers in front
of the scripts.

Comments?

Perry