Re: libinit idea

On 24 Feb 2014, at 13:25, Matthias Gamsjager <mgamsjager_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> How about delaying the startup of services that are not necessary right at
> the start. For example sshd, samba etc could be loaded after xdm ( or even
> after the DE has loaded).

It's a good idea, but it depends on a far more complex system than our current rc.  

For example, what happens if you're mounting home directories over SMB?  You need to make sure that XDM doesn't complete the login until samba has started, which requires automounter / autofs integration with the init system.  You want to speculatively start samba (because you know a user is going to need it), but in such a way that you can delay directory lookup resolution until it's actually started.

There is a reason most systems are moving away from services started by a pile of shell scripts: the complex dependencies and event models that they must handle require some complex generic logic.  You can probably implement this in shell scripts, but it probably won't be fast and it definitely won't be maintainable.  

I would be fully in favour of importing a modern, flexible, service management framework into FreeBSD, but it needs some very careful design.  Launchd, systemd, SMF, and so on all have some good ideas, but none is quite the right fit for FreeBSD.

David