RE: [gentoo-dev] init script guidelines

[Eric Brown]

A few responses:
(Please forgive the lack of normal formatting)

1) To Chris Gianelloni

I really do agree that it's silly for a daemon to lie about it's
initialization status.  However, after actually haven taken some of
these issues upstream (in particular Apache 1.3).  I realized that the
upstream devs don't really consider these bugs all of the time.  In
Apache's case, it's a bug, but one that's never going to be fixed in 1.3
(2.0 supposedly fixes it).  I think there was one case where pure-ftpd
actually fixed one of these bugs when I reported it.

My point is that Snort and Apache are not alone in this, so I suppose
quite a few upstream developers just disagree with us on what proper
initialization means.  Why should our users suffer?


2) To Mike Frysinger

Most of these services are pretty common, and the suckage is usually
limited to this area of initialization =)

I do see how timing could be an issue for sleeps, but I would personally
much rather have a timeout variable in conf.d somewhere rather than no
check at all.

I would also much rather have a simple check be performed that produced
false positives itself (which is what the init scripts are doing now),
as long as it cut down on the total number of false positives.


3) To anyone else

So far it looks like developer awareness is the best we can do?
What about making standard functions or check services available to help
developers who are aware and need to use them?

Even if developers just become willing to add checks, that would be
great.  Right now most devs simply rely on upstream (although I think
upstream should certainly be a part of each case).

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