IRC meeting

[Kir Kolyshkin]

Rob Ubuntu Linux wrote:
> On Nov 28, 2007 9:45 PM, Mildred <ml.mildred593 at online.fr> wrote:
>   
>> Le Tue 27/11/2007 à 14:07 Rob Ubuntu Linux à écrit:
>>     
>>> Now does Upstart provide something better?  Or does it just say run
>>> levels are deprecated?
>>>       
>> Apparently Upstart provides (or will provide) profiles wich are just
>> like runlevels (but easier to configure since its configuration is a
>> single file while sysvinit uses symlinks).
>> And I think there are even advantages over runlevels in that I think
>> you will be able to define the profile to use on the kernel command
>> line and then tell upstart to allow or not others jobs to start,
>> overriding the profile.
>>
>> Isn't that enough ?
>>     
>
> Sounds good to me.  You can set the runlevel to boot into on kernel
> command line now, or pass an argument to a script, the args not
> "eaten" by the kernel, get passed on (while back on this list I used
> that to chain init(8) via a shell script as someone wanted a "profile"
> like feature to choose network interface).  I have read about profiles
> as a spec, that doesn't mean it actually gets implemented, and I
> haven't seen much on that side of things.  If I'd seen a "runlevels
> are being replaced by named profiles" rather than "are history" I'd
> know they were valued, just viewed as ugly in the SyS V init
> incarnation.
>   
Not sure if it makes sense for me to get into conversation at this 
point. Just two thoughts I want to share.

1. symlinks are probably ugly, but they do their work fine, and given 
the tool such as update-rc.d (or rc-update as in Gentoo, or chkconfig as 
in RHEL/Fedora) you don't have to manually do ln -s anymore.

2. Gentoo also uses SysV init, but they have runlevels such as boot, 
default, single, nonetwork, i.e. they don't use figures but rather 
names. No need to reimplement init from scratch for that.