Re: Documentation of services

[Aaron Gaudio <prothonotar tarnation dyndns org>]

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 00:34 +0100, James Wilkinson wrote:

> If the alsa script in /etc/init.d was responsible for the whole ALSA
> sound system, then yes, you would be correct. But it isn't. It only
> looks after one part of ALSA: setting the sound levels. It would be
> annoying to have to reset them each time, but it's not essential.
> Since the /etc/init.d/alsa script *isn't* responsible for the whole of
> ALSA, it should be given a name that better reflects what it does, and
> that can be found in the manual pages.

Unfortunately, if you call the init script 'alsactl' and expect to be
able to find a man page on the init script by typing 'man alsactl' you
will be sorely disappointed. The only way around this is to introduce a
new man page section for init scripts, and like someone else in this
thread pointed out, if you have a user that could find this
documentation, it's probably a user that could 'less' the script itself.

Now, aside from the aforementioned system-config-services type of
contextual documentation, there could be a 'help' argument in addition
to the standard 'start|stop|restart|reload' commands. Now someone needs
to only know how to use /sbin/service, which they should already know if
they plan on starting or stopping the service from a terminal anyway.

-- 
Aaron Gaudio <prothonotar tarnation dyndns org>