Re: Documentation of services
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(a)tarnation.dyndns.org>