[OCF] ocf-shellfuncs standardization - Comments? Objections?

[Ragnar Kjørstad]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 12:06:05PM -0700, Nick Stoughton wrote:
> > > Thanks! See http://bugs.linuxbase.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1043 for the
> > > proposed corrective action here!
> > 
> > First, I don't understand _why_ the standard should specify this. Any
> > reason it could not be up to the implementations?
> > 
> Why? Because it is unspecified to the point of uselessness!

I don't think so.
The purpose the standard is primarely for software vendors to write
initscripts in away that would work across linux distributions, right?

So, if something fails in my initscript, I need a way to convey
information about that to the user. The LSB defines how I can do that.
It doesn't define how the message will actually reach the user - that is
implementation specific. As an initscript author I really don't care. As
long as I can call this function and that cause the user to see my
message, I'm happy!

> > Second, if the standard specified how the logging functions should be
> > implemented, it would no longer be possible with alternative
> > implementations for e.g. sending the messages to the X console.
> > 
> > So I think this proposed change is a step in the wrong direction.
> > 
> 
> I'm quite open to alternative suggestions. But I would have thought that
> logging the message to the standard output was the best thing for your
> purposes ... this allows you to redirect it easily (including via use of
> constructs such as "exec > foo" to redirect all following output to a
> specified file) so that an RM can keep track (including redirecting all
> stdout to a Unix domain socket, or to the X console, for example).

But after the data has been written to stdout, there is no longer any
way of seperating what was info messages, warnings, failures and errors.
I just have a pipe of messages.

If however, the environment (the distribution or whatever it is that
implements the LSB functions) is free to implement it any which way, it
can have implementations that do different things with the different
types of messages. I already mentioned the example where Red Hat's
implementation of warning/error messages cause the graphical environment
to automatically go into detailed mode.

> > I guess, allthough many people here may have an interest, it is getting
> > out of the scope of OCF. Are there any LSB specific mailinglists that
> > one should subscribe to to keep track of things like this? Or is
> > bugzilla the recommended communication medium?
> For this, bugzilla is the best place ... 
> However, there are also several mailing lists where LSB matters are
> discussed, including lsb-wg and lsb-discuss. See
> http://www.linuxbase.org/modules.php?name=Content2&pa=showpage&pid=27

Thanks.


-- 
Ragnar Kjørstad
Software Engineer
Scali - http://www.scali.com
Scaling the Linux Datacenter