Which Style Init Scripts Do You Prefer?

An anonymous reader asks: "I started using Linux years ago, with a Red Hat distribution. When Red Hat's custom configurations started getting in my way, I jumped ship to Slackware. I have never looked back except that I cannot stand the BSD style init scripts. I like having a full compliment of run-levels and control on the fly over which scripts will be running, and which ones will not. That is hard to achieve, when you put multiple configurations in the same file. I also liked having the scripts around to start, stop, and restart services. While I was rewriting my own startup scripts [based on Debian's scripts], I discovered that there is a third style, based on dependencies. AFAIK this is the style adopted by Gentoo. I don't want to start a distro war; but, I am curious about what kind of init scripts Slashdot readers prefer, and what they think are the benefits of each."

Comments

BSD-style

[ctr2sprt]

The thing I like most about BSD-style scripts is that they don't insist on starting and killing daemons one at a time. They also allow for asymmetric scripts, sort of; Linux tends to kill every service individually on shutdown, which is really annoying because it takes forever. 99.9% of programs can handle kill -TERM -1 && sleep 5 && kill -KILL -1, which init does automatically when it changes runlevels. I guess it's nothing inherent in SysV-style scripts I dislike; it's the way they're used.

I don't think the lack of "/etc/init.d/daemon stop" is that big a disadvantage. "killall daemon" works just as well - in fact, that's all most stop scripts do. The only thing you lose is the pretty color graphics.

This is definitely prime material for a religious war, though, as neither approach offers any real benefit. You can easily make either approach do whatever you want. With SysV-style scripts, it's slightly easier to let packages say how they should be started; with BSD-style scripts, it's slightly easier to understand the "big picture."