Re: Init system deba{te|cle}

[Conrad Nelson <yaro@marupa.net>]

On 11/04/2013 10:22 AM, Tom H wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 2:33 PM, Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 10:23:02AM +0100, Marko Randjelovic wrote:
> > > I find shell scripts the most efficient way to automate system adin
> > > tasks. It could be because I am a programmer, but at least init
> > > scripts are already provided, and small modifications should not be a
> > > problem even for non-programmers. For new scripts you have 'skeleton'
> > > file that can be easily adjusted for a particular work.
> > Amongst other problems, how do you (or the package system) reconcile
> > when you have made a local modification to an init script and the
> > upstream package has made another in an update?
> Also how many init scripts are admins editing or is this theoretical?
>
> And if it's to fix lacunas in the scripts shipped by Debian, are bug
> reports being filed for these scripts to be patched?
If they are talking about your work being overwritten by a change of the 
config file upstream,. I think just about every package manager under 
the sun actually alerts the user and tries to get them to resolve the 
change if they detect user modifications to the config.

The argument seems specious to me. Admins make changes to system configs 
all the time, it's part of what they do. And package managers usually 
can tell if they are putting out configs that'd change what the admin 
made and (often) just save it to a side file and call attention to it. 
There's no reason they wouldn't do the same for unit files.

Conrad