One of the nicest features of OpenRC/Baselayout 2 (that sooner or later will hit stable I’m sure) is that you can replace bash (which is slow, as its own documentation admits) with a faster, slimmer pure POSIX shell. Okay, so maybe Fedora is now moving away from shells altogether and I guess I can see why from some point of views; but as Nirbheek said it’s unlikely to be suitable for all use cases; in particular, our init system tends to work perfectly fine as is for servers and embedded systems, so … I don’t see the reason we should be switching there. Adding support for dash or any other POSIX sh-compatible fast shell is going to be a win-win situation there — do note that you still need bash to run ebuilds, though!
Now, you can use dash already for the basic init scripts provided by OpenRC and Baselayout, but all the packages need to install proper Posix SH-compatible init scripts if you want to use it with them. Thankfully a number of users seem to care about that, such as Davide last year and Kai right now.
But POSIX compatibility is not the only thing we should actually look out for in our init scripts:
- Eray pointed out that some scripts don’t re-create their
/var/runsubdirectories which is indeed a problem that should go fixed at some point; I had similar bad issues with running my own router based on Gentoo; - one too often misused parameter of
start-stop-daemonis--quietwhich can be… way too quiet; if it’s passed, you’re not going to receive any output at all if the daemon you’ve tried to start fails; and that is a problem; - there are problems with the way the
system-servicesPAM chain is passed through so that limits are not respected (and if that’s the case, caps wouldn’t be respected coming from PAM either); - the way LXC works, init scripts looking just at the process’s name could cause a guest’s daemon to stop if the host’s is closed… this is mostly exercised by
killallbut alsostart-stop-daemonwhen not given a pidfile (and rather just an executable) will have the same problem; and the same goes forpkill, goes without saying.
These are a number of polishing tasks that are by all count minors and not excessively important but… if you’ve free time and care about Gentoo on LXC, embedded or with fast startup, you might want to look into those. Just saying!