I mentioned that I’d converted a few of the F/OSS software packages that we use on our home system. Of course, the point of smf(5) isn’t to force you to rewrite all of your init.d scripts—it’s to force you to encourage your vendor to do so. (Wait, that’s not right, either.) I’ll come back to this aspect, but let’s talk a bit about service bundles.

The service bundle (or service manifest) is meant to accompany the package delivering the software. If a System V-style package uses the i.manifest class action script to identify its manifests, then these will be automatically imported into the repository upon package installation. (The class action script knows about zones, LiveUpgrade, and a couple of complicated circumstances where it’s not safe to import automatically.) In any case, upon the next reboot, unimported manifests in /var/svc/manifest will be automatically imported, and such services will be present in the graph.

Service manifests should deliver services disabled by default, so no one gets surprised by “hey, port N is now open—why’s that?” after a package installation. For these cases, all the administrator needs to do is

  svcadm enable service_fmri





  

That is, the intentions for the service are owned by the system administrator. (There are exceptions for service complexes, where multiple services are involved, but manipulating interior services of a complex should be done by using temporary enable/disable requests. See svcadm(1M) and smf_enable_instance(3SCF).)

If you’re delivering software outside of the System V packaging, your installer can do the equivalent: use svccfg(1M) to import the service. If you support some form of upgrade, you can enable the service if you detected that the service was effectively enabled already. Remember to think about your uninstall action as well. For the default packages, we disallow deletion of a package that contains an enabled service instance. (A check on accidental removal.)

So those are the fundamentals—more detail is available in our service developer introduction. But the big question is what F/OSS software would you like to see example conversions for, first? (And tell us what commercial packages matter, too.) I’m going to start describing a few of the ones I mentioned a few days ago but, again, the goal isn’t to cause the creation of hundreds or thousands of custom descriptions of a standard software service, but to get the service described and to have that description accompany the service to deployment.