Great argument!

Posted Feb 24, 2014 12:54 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Great argument! by oldtomas
Parent article: Debian TC vote on init system coupling

I have used SysV init style from it's beginning, since before Linux. On a variety of systems, Solaris, SCO Unix, various Linux distributions, an AIX machine, and probably a few others I've forgotten right now. The TL;DR version is that this is almost as non-portable as humanly possible.

Next to impossible to configure (but Fedora/Red Hat setups cleaned that up so it was manageable, but those were distribution-specific...). The LSB mandate for init script headers was also a large step forward.

Migrating even a simple service from one system to the other meant (1) read and understand a init script of a hundred lines, mostly boilerplate with little reason for this specific case, (2) chase down shell code libraries of a thousand or so lines to look up what exactly some strange functions do (after wasting time looking for them as commands), (3) trawl through manpages to understand the meaning of some exotic flags to common (or not-so-common) utilities. And then the real fun of redoing all this in a wildly different setup just started: (4) find a similar service whose init script can be used as template, (5) understand it and modify it to fit, (6) again reverse engineering of shell libraries, (7) manpages for non-GNU utilities to see how to get things done, (8) workarounds for non-existing/different/broken commands, (9) endless fun with shell differences. (10) is see where to fit in in in the rigid start/stop order (luckily most of the time this is just slapping it on at the end, as nothing else should depend on it). Then (11) try starting/stopping/restarting (if the target setup even allows that...). (12) is to set it up so it is started/stopped in the right runlevels (no, not all systems have the ntsysv(8) helper, runlevels vary in their definition, ...). Finally (13) reboot and hope for the best. No real tracing/debugging available, so it is fire and cross your fingers.