[patch] halt/reboot/shutdown cleanup

[Doug Barton]

On 05/14/2012 07:36, Warner Losh wrote:
> 
> On May 14, 2012, at 3:25 AM, Doug Barton wrote:
> 
>> On 5/13/2012 3:42 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
>>> 
>>> On May 13, 2012, at 4:06 PM, Jilles Tjoelker wrote:
>>>> Also, the normal forms of halt and reboot will now call
>>>> shutdown so users get a clear message of the event.
>>> 
>>> I hate these messages, which is why I always use halt or reboot
>>> to avoid them.
>> 
>> You hate messages? Seriously?
> 
> Seriously.  And I'd appreciate it if you didn't mock me on this.  It
> is rude and insulting and not constructive to a dialog.

Just to be clear, I wasn't mocking you. I recently did actually mock
someone for something that seemed so totally impossible that I felt it
was safe to mock, and it turned out I was wrong. So what I'm trying to
get at is what your real concerns are.

If you seriously hate messages saying that things are shutting down
properly, and that's a key issue for you objecting to the change that
Jilles is proposing, we can look at ways to mitigate that. If what
you're really saying is, "I want to do it the old way, no matter what,"
that's a whole different issue.

>>> I find the additional delays from doing a shutdown -r to also be
>>> annoying, which is why I never use them.
>> 
>> If things are working as they should be, running rc.shutdown won't
>> cause any delays at all vs. the brute force method used by
>> 'shutdown'. The only time you'll see a delay is if something that's
>> being killed actually needs it to cleanly shut down.
> 
> halt and reboot are low level interfaces.  shutdown is the higher
> level interface that people should use.

The problem is that people see the names "halt" and "reboot" and assume
that "simpler is better" and use them. The fact that the proper way to
reboot a FreeBSD system is 'shutdown -r' is ... just silly.

> See my other post for a way forward, sans bogusly scary names.

I've read the other messages in the thread, and I'm glad to see we're
converging on a way forward. I don't like the names fast{halt|reboot}
because they still sound "better" than the proper solutions to an
unsophisticated user. My first choice would be something like unsafe,
but I'd settle for something like old as the prefix. Then we can make
'reboot' do what 'shutdown -r' does, and 'halt' equivalent to 'shutdown
-p'.

Doug

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