Show HN: Beginning, a work-in-progress init system | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Beginning, a work-in-progress init system

github.com

22 pointsSomasis5 comments

Hi HN, I've been working on this for a while and I was looking for some feedback on it. I've been using it on my laptop, servers, etc. without issues for a few months.

Not bad. It's another BSD rc.d-like, which is a rather minimal yet very clean architecture. It doesn't quite approach the terseness of rc.subr(5) with the initscripts that practically become key-value pairs, however. It's nice for minimalists like us, but also for most people wouldn't be compelling in comparison to OpenRC. Being entirely Bash-driven would is also unfortunately a death knell for promoting it as a modern replacement.

OpenRC was actually what I tried before making this, but my experience with it is part of what resulted in the creation of Beginning. It wanted to be a modern replacement for sysvinit and such, but ended up taking a lot of sysvinit's cruft and, in my opinion, ends up being too complex for what I wanted it for.

I'm not sure I agree with the comment about it being Bash-driven, though. I chose bash because it's readily available and had been proven to work fine from what systems I studied (namely OpenBSD and Arch Linux's initscripts). Being a modern replacement is not what I'm looking for, I just want to make something different that doesn't needlessly complicate.

  #!/bin/bash
  #!/bin/bash
  #!/bin/bash

One of the major improvements to System 5 rc on Linux in the past couple of decades came not from adjusting configuration mechanisms (e.g. r2d2, file-rc) or helper script function libraries. It came from the simple realization that the Bourne Again shell was a quite heavyweight choice for running a lot of non-interactive scripts.

* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh

* https://wiki.debian.org/BootProcessSpeedup#Using_a_faster_sy...

* http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/b...

   HWCLOCK_TZ=$(readlink /etc/localtime | cut -d/ -f5-)

One of the improvements to BSD /etc/rc.conf{,.local} pioneered by OpenBSD 5.6 is that they are no longer shell scripts, but are simple lists of name=value pairs, that can thus be parsed, used, and maintained by things other than just shell script interpreters.

OpenBSD also gained an rcctl command, where one could run (say) "rcctl enable salt_master" and it would adjust the rc.conf files to enable the salt_master service. nosh has a shim for it.

* http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade56.html#OtherChanges

* http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140820090351

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