Gunnar Wolf commented on my recent series of init script posts. Thanks for the feedback.

The thing is that I've been doing a lot of Debian stuff these days (such as our GSoC coordination, and lots of stuff you saw in this blog). But I shouldn't... instead I should be trying to finally get my diploma thesis done.

I had my exams last july. If I had been focused, I could have been finished with my degree last christmas. Now it will likely by this fall. :-( All that is remaining is my final thesis. It should be written in 6 months, but I still havn't submitted my topic yet. So if you are wondering what took me 8 months already: I investigated two topics, but they didn't work out. Then I started researching for my 'current' topic, and I have a vision for it, but I still havn't managed to convince my professor (which of course is largely due to me not being able to convey this idea, and that the topic is in information management and representation, where it's probaly often hard to find a solid theoretical part. I have examples I'd like to do, and I hope they are actually convincing, but I have no idea how to 'prove' something here; it's too much about social aspects and human perception I guess, and I'm not really qualified or capable to do solid research in that field.)

(And as you can probably imagine, I'm pretty fed up with studying now. A year ago, I'd have considered to go for a PhD afterwards, but now I just want to get out, and work on my projects.)

Anyway, I got distracted. Back to the init topic.

I already posted this link: Init Hackfest, as well as a pointer to the initscripts-ng mailing list. I'd really like to get this topic on it's way for lenny. So please, join this effort. While I'd like to push it, I shouldn't; on contrary, I should suspend my Debian efforts.

As for your (Gunnar) suggestion on how to handle multiple inits: what's wrong with just including multiple init scripts in one package? They are not particularly large and compress well. A single init script package might already be bigger than all the init scripts.

The problem is more on how to write these init scripts; by the time we're done with this project, we might actually have hit 1000 init scripts. Yes; I didn't just make up this number: packages.debian.org has 890 hits for /etc/init.d; the init-like scripts in /etc/dbus-1/event.d not included. So if just want to add support to 5 alternate init systems, this means we would need to write 5000 new init scripts. Ouch. So we maybe should convert them to 1000 meta-init-scripts instead, and generate the 6000 real init scripts from them.

Please join the discussion, and lets get this project going, despite having to face such scaringly high numbers...