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Re: /etc/init.d scripts



On Sat, Apr 17, 1999 at 04:57:47PM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> The real point is that there are two conflicting desires:
> 
> 1. That the sysadmin be able to make stupid changes to the environment,
> and that everything still work.
> 
> 2. That the sysadmin be able to make clever changes to the environment,
> and have it affect everything in the desired way.

Consider bugs #10813 and #32579 [0].

The problem isn't that making stupid changes makes everything break, the
problem is that even `clever' changes make everything break. Subtly even.

I'm of course happy to leave everything exactly as it is for the moment
-- I'm not that averse to the ``It hurts if I do this'' ``Then don't
do that.'' philosophy -- but I think that just declaring that changing
root's PATH, TZ, LOGNAME, etc are `stupid' isn't necessarily the best
solution to this.

But working out exactly what should be reset how isn't a trivial thing
to do [1], and at least the current behaviour is -reasonably- obvious.

Cheers,
aj

[0] For those people who, like me, have really cool mail readers that
    let you just click on URL and load up Netscape...

        http://bugs.debian.org/10813
        http://bugs.debian.org/32579

[1] Well, if it is, please feel free to outline it. Ideally provide
    patches for /etc/init.d/* that fixes all these complaints and
    introduces no new ones. Ideally.

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.

``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking
  for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''

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