Hacker News Reader

Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Yes, there was a reason: Having to support other distros.

The big deal now is that all the major distributions support the same mechanism.

Which of course still leaves OS X, *bsd, Solaris AFAIK. But it should cut down on the internal Linux incompatibilities a bit. I'm not a fan of systemd, but having one broken standard is much better than having four broken standards :-)

> Which of course still leaves OS X, bsd, Solaris AFAIK.

AFAIUI OS X has launchd, and Solaris has OMF[1]?

... so basically the BSDs are the ones left behind?

[1] I think that is the acronym for Solaris' XML-based standardized system service files? (I don't care that they're XML. It care that they're standardized.)

Solaris 10 and 11 have SMF

Ah, SMF, that was it! Thanks

Thinking that the BSDs have been left behind is to erroneously presume that the BSDs ran System 5 rc in the first place. They did not. Most of them use Mewburn rc (or their own reinvented version thereof), which was invented almost a decade after van Smoorenburg rc, which itself was invented about half a decade after System 5 rc.

Here's a "portable" script for van Smoorenburg rc that ports to 4 Linux families, complete with the sort of case statements that I described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357589 :

* http://conman.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/etc/conman.init.in

Here's a Mewburn rc script:

* http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/etc/rc.d/...

I'm talking about the time when other distros were already on systemd, but ubuntu wasn't. Of course we needed shell scripts before that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com