Opinions on SMF

[joris dedieu]

2013/9/9 John Marino <dragonflybsd at marino.st>:
> On 9/9/2013 18:40, joris dedieu wrote:
>>> - controlled shutdown
>>> - restart
>>> - dependancy map
>>> - parallelism
>>> could easily be tacked on to rcng with a bit of ingenuity, and probably by using
>>> simple shell conventions or minor tweaks to 'rcorder'/'rc.subr', etc. rather
>>> than strict / annoying / static verification, and without destryoing the
>>> simplicity and elegance of rcng either for the common case
>>
>> I agree.
>>
>
> I think Chris's statement a silly thing to say.  Have your heard the
> phrase, "If my aunt had a package, she'd be my uncle" ?
>
> rcng doesn't have these things.  Until it does, it's not in the same
> conversation.  Saying it would be equal if it had these things means
> nothing.
>
> What's a monster?  Something built as a cohesive synergist service, so
> something patched together over decades similar to Frankenstein?  (I'd
> also like to know how SMF = monster.  no need to justify launchd as most
> linux distros don't even like it from what I can tell.)

I did not want to feed a flame, just give some informative links about
projects on rcNG improvement. So sorry for the "monster".

SMF does not avoid the need of a shell script in many case.  In most
of complex (?) tasks you switch form a shell script with convention to
a shell script without convention plus a manisfest.

Eg: http://wellrounded.wordpress.com/2007/02/12/solaris-adding-samba-to-the-service-management-facility/
http://www.synhaptein.com/synhaptein/2011/10/02/synhaptein-oi-kvm-startup.html
https://dev.holgerjust.de/projects/haproxy/wiki#Solaris-SMF-Integration

It's maybe a wrong way to do those things with SMF, but  this is the
way the things are done as far as I can see in my everyday job. It
shows how SMF commands and dialect restrict expressiveness.  And
expressiveness is IMHO the first need of a boot process.  You tell the
machine the way you want it to start. For me SMF does not answer this.
Shell does.

So sure rcNG looses some process, does not understand parallel jobs,
spend time to fork, sleep, grep and so on, but it provides shell
conventions and tools to write proper startup scripts in any
situations and avoid the need to reinvent the wheel each time you have
a non standard case. It's not an ideal solution, but it has the main
feature - expressiveness -  and SMF not.

An other time sorry if you had feel me flaming. Hop my post should help.

Joris
...


>
> John