[ On Tuesday, June 25, 2002 at 13:24:09 (+0200), Manuel Bouyer wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: rc.local and rcorder(8)
>
> On Sat, Jun 22, 2002 at 10:58:30AM +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> > > making is run unconditionnaly at the end of rc is not that good,
> > > because there are situations where you may want a rc.d script depend on
> > > something in rc.local.
> > 
> > IMHO it is just run for legacy compatibility.
> > 
> > I'd suggest: remove rc.local from the default install, and at the end of
> > startup/beginning of shutdown run it, if existent, unconditionally.
> > 
> > If you have anything depending on something else, you shouldn't put it in 
> > rc.local, but create your own rc.d script for it.
> 
> Well, it's not always easy to do a rc.d script. For some stuffs, rc.local
> is really more appropriate.

Huh?  They're both just plain old shell scripts.  If you can do
something in rc.local then you can write an rc.d script to do it as
well.  The only significant difference is that in an rc.d script you
should probably do something intelligible with the first command-line
parameter.

Other than third-party programs which expect to install their hooks in
rc.local and which you don't want to modify to do otherwise, the only
only things more appropriate for rc.local are those really simple things
that don't need to be started in any particular order, don't normally
need to be stopped before a shutdown, and which require just a simple
one-line entry to invoke, _and_ (this is the most important point) are
so trivial and unimportant that you don't want to take the few moments
that would be necessary to write a proper rc.d script.

I.e. rc.local really is just for legacy compatability and silly stuff
you might want to do with a quick hack on a test machine.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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