conf/130782: rc(8) makes undesirable assumptions on local startup scripts

[Thomas Quinot]

* dougb at FreeBSD.org, 2009-01-22 :

> State-Changed-From-To: open->closed
> State-Changed-By: dougb
> State-Changed-When: Wed Jan 21 23:13:37 UTC 2009
> State-Changed-Why: 
> 
> I think that you misunderstand what fast* and quiet* do.
> Short version is that they are handled internally by rc.d
> so that the script itself needs no knowledge of them.

Doug,

At first I was a bit surprised by your response, since the behaviour we
had observed here clearly isn't consistent with your description, so I
investigated a bit further, and I think I now understand what is going
on.

Startup scripts actually *do* need to handle fast* and quiet* themselves
*if* they are recognized by /etc/rc as "new style" scripts; everything
is indeed handled transparently by /etc/rc.d/local for local scripts
that are *not* "new style" scripts.

The problem we had was an inconsistent script that *had* a "# PROVIDES:"
comment (and so was deemed "new style" by /etc/rc), BUT failed to
handle faststart & co (or use run_rc_command to handle them
automatically).

So, in the end I agree that the system scripts' behaviour is just fine
(contrary to what I initially reported), but I still think we should
clarify our documentation regarding the distinction between "new" and
"old" startup scripts.

Thomas.