RFC: Removal of the old rc system from -current

[ Please respect followups to -arch, and avoid cross-posting responses,
thanks. ]

Summary:

I'm proposing the removal of the old rc system from HEAD, and all
subsequent 5.x releases.

Background:

During the discussion of importing the next generation rc system (rcNG)
the request was made to follow a "typical" deprecation schedule, with rcNG
as the default in 5-Release, and the old system (rcOG) still existent but
deprecated, not to be removed till 6.x. At the time, I agreed to that plan
as a sort of "wait and see" measure, since it seemed reasonable at the
time. However, I think it's time to revisit that decision.

Current situation:

If you'll pardon a bit of horn blowing, the rcNG team, especially Mike
Makonnen, has done a great job of bringing over a lot of code from NetBSD,
making some improvements, and quite a few compatibility patches. The
existing rcNG system, to the best of our knowledge, is totally
bug-compatible with rcOG. We've hit all of the project timelines that we
established for ourselves, and we continue to improve the system, while
staying responsive to bug reports. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the status quo leaves us with essentially 3 "rc
branches" to support. The rcNG code is where most new development is
occurring. There is also rcOG in HEAD, and the old rc system in RELENG_4.
This is becoming more and more difficult to support as time goes by. We're
already seeing features that are added in rcNG that there are no plans to
migrate to rcOG, mostly because they are 5.x only features. Dropping rcOG
in HEAD will free up cycles that could then be better spent on developing
new features, and back-porting useful things to RELENG_4 (whether on OG or
NG format).

We're also starting to see some confusion on the part of users about
having both systems on disk. I haven't seen a _lot_ of posts about this
yet, but I think that the rate of adoption for -current is still pretty
slow, so it's hard to judge.

In fact, I think that since rcNG has been the default for over 7 months
now, with practically zero reported problems, speaks volumes toward the
suitability of rcNG as the stand alone code base in 5.x.

Proposal for the future:

We'd like to take the following actions:

1. Remove the old rc framework prior to the 5.1-Release.

2. Backport /etc/rc.subr to RELENG_4 prior to 4.9-Release. The purpose
here is to allow ports authors to make use of the rcNG system for their
startup scripts, and to possibly allow us to backport major features that
just work better in the NG framework.

3. Start generating error messages about the compatibility variables we
are currently supporting. portmap_*, xntpd_*, and single_mountd_enable.


Your friendly neighborhood rc team is ready and willing to entertain
discussion on this topic. Particularly, if you're not using rcNG now
because it lacks some feature that the old system had, we'd really like to
hear from you.

Doug

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