Re: Updating reboot's default

On Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 6:35 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 21 June 2022 at  8:01:58 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> > 15 or 20 years ago, we talked about changing the default for reboot from
> > 'right now' to being safe shutdown. There were arguments made against it
> > due to tiny appliances and such.
> >
> > Time has past, and this oddity has persisted. It's time to revisit that
> > decision.
> >
> > I'd propose that we keep 'fastboot' and 'fasthalt' having the immediate
> > behavior. However, the 'reboot' command will switch from '-q' behavior to
> > '-r' behavior.
>
> Somehow I hear this echo "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".  My
> understanding has always been that shutdown(8) is the program that
> shuts down and maybe reboots the system, while reboot(8) is a quick
> and dirty way to reboot the system, along with halt(8) if you don't
> want to reboot.
>
> So why change this?  At the very least you'll confuse people who want
> to use the old method.  My guess is that you have some reason that's
> not immediately apparent, but what?
>

Other systems have the behavior I'm advocating. We are the odd duck. This
means we tend to violate POLA here. And there is no good reason to do this
when fastboot is available. Nobody that advocated to keep this difference
as useful the last time it came up still wants to advocate. Most people
find the behavior annoying and only a vanishingly small minority of people
like it. In fact, so far nobody has even asked to please not, let alone
come up with a good reason to retain this behavior. So, I'm polling arch@
to see if anyone like that shows up.

Warner


And no, I don't really have an axe to grind in this matter.
>
> Greg
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