OPTIONS, LATEST_LINK, and RCng

Chuck Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Mon Feb 23 22:33:01 PST 2004


Oliver Eikemeier wrote:
> Chuck Swiger wrote:
>> [...]
> 
> thanks, btw.

De nada.

>> What's more of a concern to me is that variables like USE_RC_SUBR are 
>> used by the ports infrastructure without being documented in the 
>> Porter's Handbook, which perhaps might have avoided this particular 
>> debate.
> 
> That is absolutely unfortunate, you are right. I was looking into parsing
> what is in bsd.port.mk, to get at least some of the documentation there
> into the porters handbook.

Right-- while I don't have a problem with bsd.port.mk serving as the canonical 
documentation (assuming it is?), a lack of syncronization with the Porter's 
Handbook *will* confuse and frustrate people.

>> I also have concerns about rcNG breaking things because ports which 
>> started up fine before now require an entry in /etc/rc.conf or else 
>> they silently fail, but that problem I had a patch for, if it hasn't 
>> gotten lost in the shuffle...
> 
> This is another big issue we were discussing today.  Do you still have the
> patch?  I don't know if a message at startup is prominent enough...

Found it, from Message-id: <2E8DD385-55B9-11D8-882E-003065ABFD92 at mac.com>:

--- rc.subr~    Fri Sep 26 11:52:23 2003
+++ rc.subr     Mon Feb  2 14:41:39 2004
@@ -516,6 +516,8 @@
                                         #
         if [ -n "${rcvar}" -a "$rc_arg" != "rcvar" ]; then
                 if ! checkyesno ${rcvar}; then
+                       echo "Unable to ${rc_arg} ${name}: ${rcvar} not set."
+                       echo "(Check /etc/rc.conf or try 'force${rc_arg}'...)"
                         return 0
                 fi
         fi

This addresses the concern of a startup script not doing anything and not 
displaying any indication to the user that the command did not run.  It 
suggests to the user what they should change, and where, and also tells them 
how to use something like "forcestart" or "forcestop" if they still want to 
invoke the script manually.

I that life would be better, or less astonishing :-), if rcvar defaulted to 
"y" for manual invocation and for startup scripts in /usr/local/etc/rc.d...

-- 
-Chuck


More information about the freebsd-ports mailing list