Marc Haber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Further, why should individual init scripts that are already going to
>> all the effort of using the LSB interfaces be expected to handle
>> VERBOSE individually? Why isn't this part of the log_* implementation?
> The LSB init script stuff is a red herring anyway since the Interface is
> badly designed and utterly incomplete. Init scripts are therefore forced
> to abuse the provided functions if something "special" is needed.
Is there any way that we can fix this? I *really* like the basic idea and
would be quite happy to never again write an "echo -n" in an init script.
Getting all of the output right to look reasonable even in a pure text
interface is kind of a pain, and I can definitely see why different people
may prefer different output formats for the boot messages. But the
current provided functions have some significant issues.
To take one of the most obvious, they don't deal with failure at all well.
If you try to start something and it fails with an error message, you end
up with the error message plastered after the starting message without any
blank line (and therefore often going over 80 columns), then a newline and
a space, and then the failed message.
They also don't deal at all well with programs that produce console output
when they start (fairly common when loading kernel modules, for instance).
I need some way to tell the output system that I'm about to do something
that's going to produce output and they should do something reasonable
with the formatting rather than just tack it on to the end of whatever
line happens to be on the screen.
And maybe it's just me, but having a library of convenience functions
that, if used according to directions, end up having you write code like
this seems rather silly:
[ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
do_start_kdc
case "$?" in
0|1)
if [ "x$RUN_KRB524D" = "xtrue" ] ; then
[ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_progress_msg "krb524d"
do_start_krb524d
case "$?" in
0|1) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
2) [ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
esac
else
[ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 0
fi
;;
2)
[ "$VERBOSE" != no ] && log_end_msg 1
;;
Surely the library should be dealing with some of this sort of thing.
I don't have any time at all to work on this personally, but I'm happy to
send this somewhere as a bug report or something if it would be helpful
and I'll gladly cheer on someone else who wants to tackle this!
I've been pushing back on having lintian warn when the LSB functions
aren't used precisely because things like this mean that I'm not at all
convinced they're an improvement. I think that if these issues were
addressed, they *would* be an improvement, and there are some significant
benefits to be gained from running everything through a central set of
functions for exactly the same reasons that we do the same thing with
package installation prompting and debconf.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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