Opinions on SMF

[John Marino]

On 9/10/2013 09:30, joris dedieu wrote:
> 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.

I think we just got down to the crux of this.
You're talking about "boot process", how you want things "to start".

Speaking for myself, I'm concerned with service management.  E.g. what
happens if something go down.  Service recovery.  I shouldn't have to
manually restart web servers, php spawn, mail, etc., etc. for whatever
reason. If it can be recovered automatically, it should happen.  I
booted my Solaris servers twice in 7 years (The second time because of a
physical relocation in the data center).  Obviously start-up times
weren't a priority.

> 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.

See above -- it sacrifices everything important to me in conserve
something that is not.

Regards,
John