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Summary

A project to provide an infrastructure for automatic init script generation in simple cases.

Problem to solve

A lot of packages ship init scripts, and most of these scripts are both not very well cared for (just copy’n’pasted and slightly adjusted) and also very similar. Fixing this is hard, and so is introducing new features to all init scripts.

Outline of metainit

Metainit compromises of

In a way, metainit is a mixture of the menu system and cdbs, for init scripts.

The advantages of this system are

What this system is not meant for

Replacing all init script in packages. We (at least currently) will only support “simple” daemons (no very special dependencies, no strange ways of starting or stopping them, no forking mode supported, forking is done by the init script or upstart). We do hope to make metainit work for the “boring” 80%-90% of init scripts. All other packages are welcome to continue doing what they did before.