Re: [PATCH] Shutdown cooloff feature

2009/9/29 Doug Barton <dougb_at_freebsd.org>:
> Robert Watson wrote:
>> I could be convinced by an argument that reboot and shutdown -r should
>> be the same,
>
> I have asked for this several times in the past but don't have the
> time to generate the patches myself. I think halt should be treated
> similarly as well. We just had a case (I believe on -stable) where a
> user was using 'halt' thinking that it would do the same thing as
> 'shutdown now' but was easier to type. He was having corruption in his
> ldap db because it wasn't being shut down cleanly.
>
> That said, I agree with the posters that have said that there should
> be overrides to halt and shutdown to force the old behavior.

... which probably uses BDB so it's as easy to "corrupt" as sneezing :)

But yes, what I'd wish is that the default behaviour of all (shutdown,
reboot, halt) be as "shutdown" is now, and introducting a command line
switch (I see "-f" is not taken) for the odd emergency case when the
old behaviour is needed. I'd also advocate "halt" meaning "shutdown
-p", i.e. shutdown with poweroff instead of just stopping the kernel,
which is mostly useless.