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

[Dennis J Perkins]

> I haven't really studied the LSB. My general impression in the past
> was the the LSB was really the RH[RedHat}SB, ie that they took RH
> usage from about 5 years ago and made it the standard, although I have
> heard that Debian had significant input as well.

LSB has standardized the basic programs and libraries that most if not
all distros have anyway:  glibc, the core utilities, etc.  It also
includes the  Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which is also used by most
if not all distros.  And it has a section that standardizes runlevels
and programs to standardize creating the necessary runlevel symlinks.
These programs also check for dependencies, based on INIT INFO blocks in
each bootscript.

It also specifies RPM.  I don't know if I agree with RPM, but it appears
one goal is to make it easier for someone to make a program portable to
any LSB-compliant distro.

> Whatever. I'm not especially interested in the LSB. Gentoo bootscripts
> are a completely new creation with dependency checking built in, and
> the runlevels are pretty much irrelevant. Even Debian/Ubuntu has a
> different scheme of runlevels. And then there's Slackware, one of my
> favorites, who have stuck with BSD style bootscripts.
> 
> Since most users will never encounter anything but runlevel5(4 for
> some distros) for gui and runlevel 6 for shutdown, the whole business
> of trying to cooerce everyone into an (IMHO) antequated pattern is
> just a big ho-hum.

I thought about whether all of these runlevels are needed. Maybe.  Maybe
not.  If you are having trouble with X, you can try booting into a
non-GUI runlevel.  And I suppose you could create GRUB options that
would let you choose a runlevel version for networked vs. non-networked
sessions.