Bug#711853: insserv: Design bug: rcN.d unstable and not, maintainable

[Dmitry Bogatov]

[2019-05-01 13:25] Alessandro Vesely <vesely at tana.it>
> Put it another way, if I drop the (admittedly unrealistic) possibility
> to edit rc?.d's by hand, I would have to conclude that that
> architecture is a relic devoid of its functionality.  Do we maintain
> it for aesthetic reasons, like the Colosseum?
> I wouldn't know.  I like it, probably just because I've been using it
> for so long.  I appreciate LSB comment convention as a clever
> evolution, which helps ordering the links.  Preserving that somewhat
> baroque directory structure, deprived of its flexibility merits,
> however, sounds fictional.

Beauty in the eye of beholder. I do not see anything baroque or
fictional in /etc/rc[0-6] directory structure.

In theory, we could have replaced symlink tree with some other output
format. Plain text file, autogenerated shell script, cdb database,
whatever.

To do so, we would need at least:

 * change insserv to generate new format
 * change /etc/init.d/rc and startpar to read this format
 * have transition plan from symlink tree format

It would have at least following downsides:

 * it will break third-party scripts. They exist. I wrote some.

I see following upsides, aside from aesthetic:

 * we could move output under /var, where it actually belongs.

So, I do not think it worth the trouble, sorry.

But I think it would be nice to add note /etc/rc[0-9]/README, that
content of this directories are not meant to be edited manually. Sad
that I can't chmod 444 symlink.
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