On Apr 8,  5:14pm, cchen@nougat.org (Secret Asian Man) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: The new rc.d stuff...

| It's just that it would be nice if people actually knew how their system
| worked...

Not all people need to know exactly how everything works. Companies
cannot afford to hire `n' experts in their computer administration
department. There are positions for people who do not need/want to
know all the internals, can be useful, and perform many tasks if
the tasks are simple and well documented.  Providing consistent
interfaces helps those people and prevents them from making mistakes.

The experts can still do it the old fashioned way:

	kill -HUP `cat /var/run/amd.pid`

will still work.

You can read rc.subr if you want to find out how it exactly works. It
is very well written and documented.

There are things about the monolithic rc and rc.conf scheme that were
attractive; the new rc scheme takes some getting used to, but it has
lots of advantages. As more people get to use it they'll find problems
and we will solve them, making it more useable. The rc.conf problem
has not been tackled yet.

christos