Re: LSB specification of runlevels
On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 11:25:31AM +0200, Joost Kooij wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 11:16:38PM -0400, Alan Shutko wrote:
> > joost@topaz.mdcc.cx (Joost Kooij) writes:
> >
> > > Books that learn people that "telinit 5" starts X11, imho deserve to
> > > be obsolete. In my book, "/etc/init.d/xdm {start,stop,restart}" is
> > > the preferred interface to manually intervene in the running of xdm.
> >
> > Most distros start xdm from init, so it's natural you would turn it on
> > or off by twiddling init.
>
> No, the point is that this is not natural, in fact.
What's natural is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly "telinit 5"
is easier to type. You're used to using /etc/init.d/xdm {start,stop},
and so it seems more natural to you. But for a novice user, and for
books for novice users, it's actually much more complicated. For
example, you need to know whether or not you're using gdm, or xdm, or
kdm, or some other Desktop Manager. So you need to know (and the book
needs to explain to you) how to figure this out.
Contrast this with "just execute telinit 5 as root".
> I want my linux to be like unix, not like windows. Please don't make
> "twiddling" the norm here, too. Straightforward interfaces are needed.
> They are available, but they are ignored, because the author of some
> book didn't know his subject and did insufficient research.
The problem is that Unix does *not* have straightforward interfaces;
Unix (and Debian programs in particular; see a separate rant I've
written about why dselect sucks as an interface) give you lots of
power, but it doesn't give you straightforward interfaces to
accomplish specific tasks which users commonly want to do. Sure,
"/etc/init.d/{service} {init-action}" and dselect are a much more
general interfaces. But general interfaces which don't have easy ways
of doing commonly needed tasks are often really lousy and painful
interfaces to use, even for experts.
The bottom line is that with attitudes like this, it's no wonder that
Debian has interfaces which are actively hostile to new users, even
new users with over decade of Unix experience.
- Ted
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