Possible OS suggestion: make service status smarter about process runtime

From: Dan Mahoney <freebsd_at_gushi.org>
Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2022 18:18:43 UTC
Hey all,

There's no mailing list for "rc" commands so I'm putting this in generic questions.

We've recently done some pkg upgrades and would like to restart the various services.

It occurs to me that since the rc subsystem knows the command involved, (say, /usr/local/sbin/httpd), and already looks at the process table and the pid file to figure out if it's running, It's also possible to extend the output of service foo status to print how long a service has been running.

Further, this could be extended such that there was a way of telling, post pkg upgrade or post freebsd-update install, which services were in need of a restart.  (I.e. which files had mtimes newer than their runtimes).

Thoughts on this?  Is it worth a feature request?