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Proposal: Cygwin service activation tool.


I've just spent about a day getting the sysvinit package to work.  In general I find activating 
services under CYGWIN a huge pain.  Most of the time the instructions included in the 
README's do not work, and even if they do, finding the right README itself can be
a challenge.  For example, to get the init daemon to work the way I expected it to work, 
I finally had to write the following script "/usr/sbin/init.sh":

#!/usr/bin/bash
/sbin/init.exe -i & p=$!
trap "/sbin/telinit 6;sleep 3;kill -INT $p;exit" SIGINT
while [ 1 ] ; do
  sleep 5
done

Then I had to figure out how to use cygrunsvr to unintall init, and install init.sh in it's 
place.  Then the next trick was to edit /etc/inittab.  It turns out the inittab installed 
by the cygwin package is incorrect to start services, and init is not parsing the
inittab in the way specified by the manual page when changing runlevels.

In this case my ultimate goal was to install cron as a service, which still required 
more work to get working.

Anyway, my point is not to say we need to recreate all the service packages 
with better documentation.  Rather, we need a single tool to allow users to 
configure and activate services they have installed.  Once the tool is refined 
enough for reliable use, Setup could be modified to instruct users to run it 
after completing the installation process.  However, considering how difficult
it is to get even an existing package approved for adding to the cygwin 
distribution, I figured it would be better to have a discussion before I attempt 
to write such a tool.

                                                     Bill



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