init: API

[David Malcolm]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 12:04 -0500, Dimi Paun wrote:

[snip]

>   * a way for services to interact with the administrators
>     (for example to ask for passphrases, etc.)

Youch!  :-)  Writing it that way makes me think of some nightmare world
where the httpd service is restarting _me_

I guess one viewpoint on all of this is to think of the various users of
Fedora (enthusiast at home, manager of a small to medium-sized network
etc) and think about the sorts of interaction they ought to be having
with this layer: what should their experience be like?  What kind of
user input do the services need?  I'm coming at this from a "make
everything just work" perspective.  Maybe the split here is:
- services that make this computer work (which a non-technical end-user
hopefully never has to think of, but if they do e.g. when
troubleshooting they can think of it as part of the central nervous
system); examples might be the Avahi daemon, the nightly yum update,
etc.  With my end-user hat on, I never want to have to care about any of
this stuff.
- services that are useful to the rest of the network and/or the
internet (which a non-technical end-user might think of as a "service");
an example might be httpd.

[snip]

Hope that's helpful