[clue-tech] Any Gentoo users in the group?

[Dennis J Perkins]

On Sat, 2007-09-01 at 07:51 -0600, Collins Richey wrote:
> On 8/31/07, dennisjperkins at comcast.net <dennisjperkins at comcast.net> wrote:
> > If there are any Gentoo users in the group, do they know if Gentoo is LSB compliant?
> > _______________________________________________
> 
> Gentoo is mostly and intentionally LSB compliant, but the LSB has some
> ridiculous notions about the /usr hierarchy that interfere with the
> ability to include multiple versions of major systems like KDE and
> GNOME. Instead of throwing these i /usr/bin, they use something like
> /usr/kde/<rel>/bin so that KDE releases don't conflict with one
> another.
> 
> Most distros live quite happily with the /usr restrictions, because
> they don't care about multiple KDE/GNOME releases.
> 

I've been exploring bootscripts and that has expanded into how various
distros handle them.

Arch Linux is not LSB-compliant and seems to think that is a good thing.
Actually, it is probably mostly compliant simply because the distros
install a lot of the same packages.  But Arch is not compliant when it
comes to the bootscripts and it follows the BSD-style of booting.

I know Gentoo has this directory structure for the symlinks:

/etc/runlevels            /etc/rc.d
      boot                  sysinit
      shutdown              rc0.d 
      single                rc1.d  (single user)
      nonetworking          rc2.d  (mulituser, no networking)
      default               rc3.d  (multiuser full networking)
                            rc4.d  (reserved for local use)
                            rc5.d  (X11)
                            rc6.d  (reboot)

The Linux Standard Base specifies runlevels 0-6.  It does not specify a
sysinit or boot, but these are actually prior to entering a runlevel.

Gentoo has chosen to use more descriptive names, which LSB does not
disallow since it only specifies runlevels, not their names.  You can
add more runlevels if you want.  Gentoo's names are probably a real
improvement over the traditional names.  However, there aren't as many
runlevels as LSB requires.  

LSB also requires /usr/lib/lsb/install_initd
and /usr/lib/lsb/remove_initd for activating the bootscripts.  I don't
say adding and emoving symlinks, because you could use a follow that
contains a list of the scripts to run for each runlevel.  I think this
what Ubuntu does in /etc/event.d.  In other words, LSB doesn't care how
you implement the runlevels; it only requires a standard means for
installation programs, such as RPM, to to use when installing and
removing packages.  Gentoo might not comply here either, because the
runlevels are not numeric.

LSB also requires /lib/lsb/init-functions, which contains start_daemon,
killproc, and pidofproc.  These are used by the bootscripts for starting
and stopping services.  LSB provides implementation requirements but
allows these to be wrappers around pre-existing functions.  Suse and
Debian/Ubuntu use these as wrappers.