Replacing rc(8) (Was: FreeBSD Boot Times)

[Wojciech Puchar]

> The more different projects can share common code, the better.

as long as we share good code and good ideas.

> Boot time is an issue for some people - even people with "never
> rebooted" servers need fast boot times when they _do_ need to reboot

speeding up anything is always good.

>> I think the big benefit of OpenRC to FreeBSD is that
>> we are looking to continually improve it and include you in the
>> requirements-gathering process for future development efforts.
>
> Even if FreeBSD doesn't switch to OpenRC, it's definitely worth
> looking at the shortcomings of the current rc system and how it could
> be improved.  The most obvious ones (IMHO) are:
> - Lack of dependency handling for manual start/stop

which is not really a problem and often an adventage.

> - No provision to automatically restart a daemon if it dies.

but it should not be a part of rc subsystem at all.

First - deamons should not die without reason. If they do, admin should 
clearly know it and feel it's effects, and after fixing a source problem , 
restart it manually.

in case when you are for some reason required (temporarily of course) to
use daemons that often dies, then just make restart wrapper shell script 
and put it in place of actual daemon in rc.d script.

This is what i do with asterisk process that rarely but do crash.

But i did it myself and any responsible admin should do this himself, 
knowing a problem.

The proposition sounds for me somehow like windows XP/7 solution that 
restarts services and windows explorer so it "doesn't fail".

Such ideas and methods of constructing operating environment is possibly 
acceptable under linux community, MAYBE for PC-BSD, but not for anything 
serious.

there is IMHO already too much automata in default FreeBSD: 
default /etc/crontab, /etc/newsyslog.conf and /etc/periodic directory.

All gets deleted by me as soon as i install FreeBSD.

All of this mechanisms are good, but none should be in default system 
install with possible exception:
*/5     *       *       *       *       root    /usr/libexec/atrun
*/11    *       *       *       *       operator /usr/libexec/save-entropy


Everything else should be run after clear request and knowledge of 
sysadmin.

scripts from /etc/periodic should go to /usr/share/examples