/service vs /var/service vs /etc/service

[Gerrit Pape <pape@smarden.org>]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 12:39:11AM +0100, Robin Bowes wrote:
> It's a different way of doing things.
>
> To fit in with FHS, certain things should go in certain places. That's  
> the reason to do it "my" way. I'm not arguing that it's better, or  
> right, but this is the reason.

Hi, I'm in the same situation, Debian adheres strictly to the FHS.
Establishing /var/service apparently failed, runit in Debian used it
since 2002, it's runit's default since 2003.  But /var/service doesn't
comply with the FHS, and this will not change.

The Debian runit package now switched to /etc/service, and I'm about to
change runit to use /service by default, just as daemontools does.
daemontools in Debian, just like runit in Debian, uses /etc/service, and
recommends to create a compatibility symlink /service -> /etc/service.

To support putting the ./supervise/ directories into a different
location than the service directories, runit deals with dangling
symlinks as discussed.  For Debian I added the update-service(8) program
to help managing this, when using update-service(8) and sv(8) you don't
need to know about the location of the directory for services, /service,
/var/service, or /etc/service, and the symlinks are set up
automatically.  So servise directories managed with these tools comply
with the FHS.

I hope this will work out.

Regards, Gerrit.