init.d script names

From: Avery Payne <avery.p.payne_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 14:54:58 -0700

Is it me, or are the Debian init.d service scripts unfortunately named?

If the script names actually aligned with the services they controlled, we
could do all kinds of things to make transitioning off of SysV easier, such
as:

+ Create a generic template script for starting services that used the
script's name as the service name to call. There are some advantages to
this, namely we can get a free ride setting up simple services by just
creating a symlink to ../.template/run, but this won't work for a number of
services because the script name doesn't match the actual executable that
is run. Example: smartd vs smartmontools.

+ We could have individual control over services instead of making
"hairballs" that do many things at once. Some services are actually 2 or
more programs rolled into one. Samba is a great example - the init.d
starts and stops nmbd and smbd together. I know I can write separate run
scripts for both services, and then write a "wrapper" script that starts
both up as dependencies. But this is an awkward solution to a fixable
issue. If the original SysV script didn't have both of the services in
there, I wouldn't need to write a special wrapper to provide backward
compatibility.

+ While it's not a problem, it's an annoyance to look at your process tree
and think "hm, that name maps to this script...I think..." But if we have
one to one mappings, it's instantly clear as to what is what.

It's not just Debian that is a culprit here, but I believe some of the
Red-Hat-alike distros have the same issue as well. If there are any
suggestions beyond what I've listed, I'm all ears: otherwise, it looks like
these will be the only way to deal with some of this silliness.
Received on Thu Oct 02 2014 - 21:54:58 UTC