[clue-tech] upstart

[Nate Duehr]

Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:10:53 -0600
> nate at natetech.com (Nate Duehr) wrote:
> 
>> dennisjperkins at comcast.net wrote:
>>
>>> I doubt that the 6 run levels used by sysvinit are necessary.
>>> Almost everyone either runs in single or multiuser mode.  I read
>>> somewhere that the 6 levels (actually there are more but are not
>>> used) are modelled after some switching device that ATT or some
>>> company had, and someone thought it was a good idea to copy it.
>> I can guarantee it.  Debian's really only used two run levels since
>> -- oh, forever.  I doubt they'll be picking up this RH wackiness as
>> their new "standard" either.
> 
> RH wackiness? upstart was written by and used in Ubuntu. 
> It's only recently been adopted by Fedora, and no RHEL release yet
> ships with it. 

Interesting.  Still wondering what "problems" they're solving.  From the 
postings today I thought it was a RH/Fedora-only thing.  My bad.

>> BSD servers seem to get along just fine with a single start script 
>> managing everything too, for the ultra-purists in the crowd.
>>
>> This new startup stuff is nothing more than "vendor lock in" to
>> RedHat, if you ask me.
> 
> I sure can't see how. See above. 
> 
>> (Uh oh, did I fan that fire?  Yep.  I went there.  RH wants to lock
>> you in just like MS did in the 80s.  Naughty naughty RH.  Well,
>> naughty if you didn't see it coming... and are somehow upset that
>> they need a way to differentiate themselves from the Linux crowd.
>> Duh.)
> 
> Do you have any kind of example or argument here? 
> Or you just dislike Red Hat? 

/etc/sysconfig perhaps?  No one else does that... and RH certainly 
didn't need to.

Now there's certification tests and lots of "momentum" to support that 
silliness forever, just as one example.  Was plain old /etc not good enough?

It wasn't for SOMEONE years ago at RH, and now it's a "standard" for 
RH-based systems.

Yuck.  What value did it add other than something geeks have to know 
about to appropriately admin RH-based systems?

>> So far, they're all not very compelling reasons to swap out SysV and 
>> switch to this thing, really.
> 
> The most compelling reason I saw was that this has a active set of
> people working on it, while SysVinit does not. It's also easy to use in
> sysvinit compatibility mode (as Fedora and I think Ubuntu are right
> now). 

Those people couldn't have just volunteered to support SysVinit? 
Sigh... volunteers...

Trust me, I understand... I "run" a volunteer organization.  It's like 
herding cats.  (Well they call me "President" of it anyway, but by no 
means do I really "run" what people want to do... I just offer up good 
ideas and hope we go there... or come up with better ones.

In fact, it's because of my experience running this volunteer group that 
I realize that Linux will never have enough "direction" to seriously 
compete on the desktop.  Apple/MS and others... have someone leading 
who, whether good or bad, the devs must follow their rules... Linux 
doesn't, and it shows.

Nate