Comment 2 for bug 583512

Revision history for this message
Ian (ian-goodacre) wrote : Re: inconsistent terminology in man 5 init

A little further along, one finds:

       The primary use of jobs is to define services or tasks to be run by the
       init(8) daemon. Each job may have one or more different processes run
       as part of its lifecycle, with the most common known as the main
       process.

There is similar confusion here. Why introduce the primary use of jobs as the
definition of services or tasks, then continue to describe how jobs have one
or more processes, leaving one wondering and completely uninformed as to
how the jobs achieve their primary purpose. The section continues to describe
how the processes are defined in a coherent way.

It would be better to remove the first sentence of the first paragraph in the
Process Definition section. It is distracting, seemingly irrelevant to the section
and adds no value to the presentation of the topic.

If the primary purpose of a job is to define services or tasks, then a section
dedicated to this primary purpose, including a description of what services
and tasks are, and how they relate to jobs, beyond being defined by them,
would be quite appropriate, and this section should probably precede the
sections giving details of file format and process definition - it is the primary
purpose, after all.