IRC meeting

[Rob Ubuntu Linux]

On Nov 27, 2007 8:27 AM, Scott James Remnant <scott at netsplit.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-11-27 at 00:39 +0000, Rob Ubuntu Linux wrote:
>
> > On 11/26/07, Scott James Remnant <scott at netsplit.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Runlevel support ... Runlevels are ancient history, forget about them.
> > > That being said, Upstart's sysv compat tools emulate them so you can't
> > > tell the difference.
> >
> > They're useful to admins though, during system maintenance.  Some
> > shorthand to move to "service level" with non-graphical login,
> > non-network services is useful.  Rebooting and remounting file systems
> > can take a long time, and when you're doing remote admin, single user
> > mode is too blunt a sword.
> >
> This isn't an argument for runlevels, this is simply an argument for
> admins to be able to select the level of system they wish to bring up.
> There are plenty of alternate ways to implement this.

Are you saying that the init(8) replacement does not need to support
some "service" level, which is configurable in some way?  Or are you
saying that it can be diferent from having run levels 2,3,4,5 be
configurable by OS Releaser and/or Sys Admin?

See I am concerned by statements like "Runlevels are ancient history,
forget about them", because whilst in Debian/Ubuntu space they may be
regarded that way.  But an admin using Red Hat/Fedora, Novell/OpenSuSE
and any other number of distro's will for instance, pass init an
argument of 2 or 3 sometimes, rather than 5 to do things like change
graphics cards, monitors, or upgrades of software like X & GNOME/KDE.
They really are used, and whilst a desktop PC could go via single user
mode, on an enterprise server that's reducing availability which
UNIX/Linux Admins will not like.