Thanks [LWN.net]

Thanks

Posted Nov 22, 2014 21:14 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226)
In reply to: Thanks by smurf
Parent article: Today's Debian technical committee resignation: Ian Jackson

Forgy invented http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm in the 70's and it was widely adopted in the early 80's.

Sad to see the wheel painfully being reinvented again.

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Thanks

Posted Nov 22, 2014 21:46 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Dependency resolution in an init system doesn't need anything remotely this elaborate. We don't even need alternates (what for?).

Thanks

Posted Nov 22, 2014 22:08 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

> Dependency resolution in an init system doesn't need anything remotely this elaborate.

Rete is not elaborate. It is a clean elegant modular algorithm.

> We don't even need alternates (what for?).

Alternate networks. Sometimes alternate data stores. Alternate entropy sources - you want sshd ASAP but maybe not until you have some entropy. "If I can't get any entropy bring up sshd only on the private LAN and if that doesn't work fall back to telnetd on the private LAN."

As the "new" init systems try to invade serious servers they will keep on running into problems and adding more keywords and reliving the 70's until they eventually relearn the lessons of the early 80's.

Thanks

Posted Nov 22, 2014 23:33 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

How would you apply this to an event-based init system?

Thanks

Posted Nov 23, 2014 0:15 UTC (Sun) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

> How would you apply this to an event-based init system?

Your own http://lwn.net/Articles/622742/ answers that.

If you want functionality beyond inittab, an event-based init system is even worse than an ad-hoc dependency-based init system that has to keep adding keywords like RequiresMountsFor.