Brian May <brian@microcomaustralia.com.au> writes:
On 10 October 2014 10:31, Peter Ross <Petros.Listig@fdrive.com.au> wrote:
What else does it do better?
It *can* replace annoying init.d scripts, that are deceptively hard to write, often are very buggy and suffer from various race conditions.
e.g.
have lost count of the number of times have "/etc/init.d/daemon restart" only to find the daemon never stopped properly in the first place, or tried to start again while it was still running and both copies exit. [...] Yes, sure, well written init.d scripts wouldn't have these problems, however the fact is these problems do get into distributions, and often go unnoticed by the responsible maintainers. "It works for me!"
There was a plan to deal with the easy 90% of these: https://packages.debian.org/unstable/metainit It was started at a Debian conference where people were pushing for upstart in Debian; it hasn't really been touched since, but since sysvinit hasn't CHANGED since, it still works for me.