Re: Re: Vision for new platform

[Isaac Dunham <idunham@lavabit.com>]

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 15:33:48 -0400
Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx> wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 08:38:57PM +0200, Daniel Cegiełka wrote:
> > I understand that and instead systemd I prefer to stay with
> > sysvinit+openrc...
> 
> sysvinit is really not a rational design. It does a lot of the same
> stupid stuff as systemd (controlling process lifetime from pid 1, but
> in this case it's only used for legacy console gettys, not for
> daemons). And runlevels never really made any sense to me; they just
> made init scripts a lot more complex and difficult to maintain by
> having to handle the additional case of switching between runlevels
> with different things in them and getting the order of stop/start
> right..

runlevels come in handy, if you know how to use them.
Debian mutilates them, though, so they seem less handy on
Debian/Ubuntu systems.
Here's what I'd do:
1. I just want to get into recovery (single-user) mode in a hurry; the
system is hosed as it stands.
2. I want a shell, quick (maybe because there's one file I need to copy
over to a flash drive)
3. Networking would be nice, but I don't want X just yet.
4. X is handy, but maybe not networking or printing...
5. Start the whole enchilada.

And yes, I do see a need for all 5 of those, including a way to start
the system in any of them (which runlevels allow, via kernel
parameters).
Sometimes, starting networking or not makes a minute or more of
difference (yes, I've timed it: 34 seconds vs 100+).  On one of my
computers, if I let the networking daemon run in the wrong area, it
reliably panics the kernel (madwifi 0.10.5.6 is the most functional
driver, except it panics if dhclient gets run too soon). So "turn off
networking via boot parameter" is mandatory for me.

In summary, if you remove runlevels, you'd have to do the same thing
another way to meet my needs.
Isaac Dunham