Named runlevels

[John Richard Moser]

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I find that some things from Gentoo are generally useful.  I've heard
that some people stay with Gentoo specifically because of its
configuration hierarchy, such as /etc/rc.conf and /etc/conf.d, or its
named runlevels and rc-update.  It may be interesting to experiment with
porting these to Debian and Ubuntu.

Configuration via text editor is relatively easy.  All the files are in
one place.

The format for init scripts that Gentoo uses is also very clean and
simple, and automatically makes a connection between conf.d files and
init.d scripts to facilitate easy development. and may be good to adopt.
~ The runscript program that interprets the scripts will translate
settings to variables based on the name of the script.  It is even
possible to allow conf.d/foo to contain settings which can be identified
separately in init.d/foo.[12345].  They even supply dependency control
for automatic determination of boot sequence.

Administration is also easy; instead of fixed rc.d directories, there
are runlevels named "boot" and whatever else.  'boot' is always run,
followed by the named runlevel for the particular numbered runlevel,
indicated in inittab.  The rc-update tool is very straight forward (add,
del) as well.

Enhancements could include cascading runlevels to give a better sense of
modularity.  Being able to symlink other named runlevels into runlevels
would allow stacking quite nicely; singleuser and singlenonet are
essentially the same, aside from networking, so why have 2 different
runlevels entirely?

This approach would of course involve some work.  Init scripts would
have to be ported to the new format.  The sys5init process would need to
be altered.  Configuration would move around.  And of course, I haven't
checked to see if LSB defines how the sys5init process works.  All of
these factors would need consideration; but I'm not here to argue
against this proposal, so I'll leave finding enough to kill it up to you.

I believe that the named runlevel approach and the way Gentoo does its
scripts are both more advanced than current mainstream Sys5init; and I
think that Gentoo's approach is ready to become mainstream.  Cascading
runlevels would be nice, but could be easily added in the future.


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