new rc questions and comments

[Christopher Blizzard]

The current page also lists a set of complaints, but it's not clear to
me from looking at what's out there already (based on the bottom of the
page - yay, research!) what your goals are?  I would strongly suggest
that if you want to get something done that you pick two or three
specific goals.  For example:

o Startup a desktop in < 25 seconds
o Only start services that are required for the machine's specific task
o Enable desktop services to start system-level services
o Give an admin or installer the choice between a "fast laptop startup"
and "startup for unix workstation environment" (by which I mean support
for nfs, kerberos, etc - not usually needed for laptops.)
o LSB compliance

And note that things like parallelism and I/O fixes are more mechanisms
for the specific goals.  Break them out.  And most important: MEASURE.
For example, if you don't know how long a particular config takes to do
what you want, you'll never know if you're making progress.

Does a simple desktop startup (ala what we find on the livecd) take too
long?  What can we do to fix it?

Just make sure you're asking the right questions.  The current wiki
entry is all over the place so I can't tell what the goal of a new init
system is other than the usual friendly technical wankery. :D

--Chris