[Cialug] Ubuntu's New Init

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Sat, 2007-03-31 at 11:59 -0500, Bryan Baker wrote:
> I wonder if some of these projects are using some of launchd since I  
> know they open sourced it.
> The thing about this needing to have been done a long time ago is  
> that the "Un*x way" is to have lots of little pieces doing discrete  
> jobs, and I believe what was there grew out of that sort of mindset.  
> I do believe that this is a step forward though, sometimes  
> consolidation is good.

> On Mar 31, 2007, at 8:45 AM, Jerry Heiselman wrote:
> > This sounds very similar to what Apple did for Mac OS X 10.4.  They  
> > replaced init, cron and at with launchd.  It has an XML-based  
> > configuration syntax.  It works pretty well, but I must admit that  
> > there are some parts of it that are more like magic to me.

I've been hearing a lot of buzz on this internally, and it sounds like
everyone is real excited about it.

The coolest part is that its entirely "plugable" similar to pam or
cron.{daily|hourly|weekly|...}. You can implement init as a plugin (and
I think this has been done actually) so that you have full support for
apps that use init but still have the underlying infrastructure in place
as apps start using the new system.

The way I understand it, they started this project before launchd was
OSS but they did use it as inspiration. However, there were some gotchas
they didn't like with launchd and so tried to avoid. Therefore it should
be an evolutionary product that takes the concept a step further.

The website for it is at: http://upstart.ubuntu.com/

IMHO, it still takes computers *way* to long to boot. I don't understand
what's going on from a technical perspective, but embedded computers
rarely take more than 2 seconds to boot. Why should I have to wait 45 -
75 seconds? Can't it just remember what it did last time and just cache
it somewhere? Seems if you did that you could boot in about 10
seconds... Especially now that network manager handles network stuff
during the login process (which I'm not really too fond of btw).

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode