Andrew Ayer

Anonymous on 2016-10-02 at 13:23:

The Unix philosophy is that you do one thing and to do it well.

That means that you should have a program reaping zombies and do nothing else.

You should have a program that starts the system services taking their dependencies into account. The oldfashioned way is to do them in a specific order, the new way is to calculate the dependencies. You should have a simple program that asks for an IP address on a network interface and does nothing else but to assign that IP address on that interface.

All these are simple programs that can be reasonably comprehended and verified.

Once you integrate all this, the complexity increases, and the amount of work to maintain the code base increases super-linearly. And as agwa says: the consequences of a problem become more troubling. Use the tools that are already there. The "runlevel switching" may want to accept "requests" from userspace. Make that a root-only socket or something.

If you want to make users able to switch runlevels or other "normally root" stuff, delegate that to "sudo" or modern variants of such tools. Or make a daemon that will accept commands from the normal users and passes them on as a privileged one. Again a bug somewhere in this process has the problems contained.

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