Re: [users] Re: Time to fight for our beloved DEB format!
On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 11:44:49PM +0000, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>:
> > The reason why the run levels are specified was to handle cases where
> > An LSB application may wish to have some kind of daemon which is only
> > running when X11/xdm is running.
>
> Given that system administrators can change and do change the meaning
> of each runlevel, any application that makes any assumptions on the
> meanings is simply broken.
I question who many system administrators really do change the
meanings of each runlevel. Most distributions have schemes where init
scripts have structured comments define the default start/stop
runlevels for a particular init script, which are used by the
installation program. So most distributions do assign default
meanings to the runlevels, which are then used by the installation
program to do the right thing when installing a particular init
script. Debian seems to be the one (only?) exception to this rule.
In any case, the main reason why we standardized run-levels was so
that we could generalize this common practice in a
distribution-nuetral way. The problem seems to be that Debian has
absolutely no standards in this space, and there are people who view
this as a feature. Personally, I view this as being little different
than most things which end up in Debian Policy. Stuff in Debian
Policy restricts the "freedom" of developers. But it allows for
better interoperability between pacakges. The same is true of what
we're trying to do with the LSB. We're trying to promote
interoperability of vendor programs across distributions....
(Also, I'd note that if people want to do their own weird shit things,
there's always runlevels 7-9, which are available for local user
customization.)
- Ted
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