Idea for FreeBSD

[Michael B Allen]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 7:14 PM,  <wbentley at futurecis.com> wrote:
> To who it may concern,
>
>   I am A FreeBSD administrator as well as a Solaris Administrator. I use
> BSD at home but Solaris at work. I love both OS's but I would like to
> increase the administrative capability of FreeBSD.
>
>   In Solaris 10 the Services Management Facility (SMF) was introduced.
> Basically what it does, is take all the rc.d scripts and puts them into
> a database to manage. Everything is converted to XML

XML is good at document processing and for portable self-describing
databases. Otherwise, I would think significantly less of any OS (or
application) that used XML for configuration data. At least nothing
that anyone would *every* be forced to edit manually.

But of course the format of data in a database is largely irrelevant.
You could implement the same thing with dbm files or a more forgiving
text format.

As for getting rid of rc.d scripts, yes they're decrepit and I would
love to see them go but they're simple and third party software may
depend on them being the norm.

Just my 2c,
Mike

PS: I'm not a FreeBSD "hacker" or even an admin.