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Proposal: Cygwin service activation tool.
- From: "Bill C Riemers" <sourceforge at docbill dot emailuser dot net>
- To: "Cygwin Apps" <cygwin-apps at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 11:23:36 -0400
- Subject: 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