Init script order tweaking

[jkroon]

Hi guys,

I know it's possible to control the startup order of services to an extent with the depend() function inside the startup scripts, but what happens when this is no longer sufficient?

Basically, my situation is this, I've got a slowish server and some services (dhcp) is more important than others (say apache or mysql). Now, none of these really depend on one another, and whilst I could go with before and after inside the depend() function, simply adding before * causes warnings to be emitted by depscan.sh.

I'm wondering whether there is another way, perhaps to give each service a priority (just a normal integer value) which will order the services that can be started simultaniously. For exmple, let's say we have three services, A, B and C, both B and C depends on A, so initially only A can be started, but once A has been started rc needs to pick between B and C ... this choice is pretty much arbitrary as far as I understand it (alphabetical order?).

What if B and C each had a priority value and when rc has a choice between multiple packages to start it picks the one with the highest priority? Yea, this brings in complications concerning multi-level priorities, for example:

A: prio=1
B: prio=2, dep=A
C: prio=3, dep=A
D: prio=5, dep=B

initially only A can be started, so it's started, now we have a choice between B and C, C gets picked, then B and only then can D (which has a higher priority than anything else) be started. Arguably a better order may have been ABDC. This could have been achieved by automatically pushing down priorities based on dependencies. So B gets prio=5 since D (with prio=5) depends on it, and in the same manner A inherits 5. Which will then result in the ABDC ordering.

Is there something like this in gentoo land or do I just need to go and add a bunch of before ??? to my dhcpd startup script?
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