Idea for FreeBSD

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2008-Aug-06 19:14:51 -0400, wbentley at futurecis.com wrote:
>   In Solaris 10 the Services Management Facility (SMF) was introduced.

The main purpose of SMF appears to be to drum up business for Sun's
training courses by radically changing Sol10 Administration for little
benefit.

>Basically what it does, is take all the rc.d scripts and puts them into
>a database to manage. Everything is converted to XML and two basic
>commands (svcs and svcadm) are used to manage everything.

So you take each line from inetd.conf (literally) and wrap it in
several KB of XML.  This definitely adds to bloat and doesn't even
obey the spirit of XML (since the content of each inetd.conf entry
remains opaque).  I haven't looked at what happens to /etc/inittab or
the rc.d scripts but I expect that it's similar.  It's not clear what
benefit this brings.

The svcs and svcadm commands are among the most arcane I have bumped
into during my >20 years of administering Unix.

I agree that some of the process management facilities of SMF are better
than exists for most FreeBSD daemons but don't believe that all the
other baggage is worth the improvement.

With FreeBSD, I can configure virtually all the system via a single
text file - which is easily found and kepy under configuration control.
With Sol10, there are random bits of configuration spread all over the
system and there is no obvious way to control configuration.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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