user-startup -- Really useful?

[scholle]

I would like to discuss the question wether the user-startup script really is useful by now. I have discarded mine not only for speed purpose during boot time, but also for a better overview of the booting sequence. Anything that has to be started early or better/only as a shell command went into the primary startup-sequence, the rest resides in the WBStartup drawer. IMHO two places is enough for starting stuff. We will not go towards Linux with its chaos of booting structure, but me thinks we should beware of the beginnings...

What do you think? Has anyone gone the same direction with the boot process?

[scholle]

:-? I would be grateful if you were a bit more detailed...

[scholle]

The logic intention to have one file for system and the other for user commands is clear but once you start finetunining your system or heading for speedups you have to fiddle around with the startup-sequence. Doing this long enough you can hardly divide between system and user commands. At some point it was enough for me already because of the number of commands. So I throw away my user-startup and reorganized the startup-sequence from the scratch. Now the chaos is banned and I am able to discover errors easily again. :-)

[scholle]

I hate installers cluttering up my systems with assigns anyway. :-D For this I try to avoid installers up to 95-98%.
All important assigns go into a list that is read by BatchAssign (Aminet), the rest is done by batch scripts when they are needed, i.e. before the corresponding executable is called in for action.

[scholle]

@Lo: If it's 2 seconds on boot-up I can gain, then I want to have them. Yes, I'm a speed-freak. :-)
But the biggest plus for me is: clearness. Before it was very hard to determine which of the commands in the startup-sequences is executed first. (o.k., this is only a problem for those who are called in the startup-sequence after user-startup is started). I had some troubles with this and only could avoid occasional gurus by inserting some wait commands at different places. Alltogether it may be about 8-10 seconds I gained...

[scholle]

So do useless replies...

[scholle]

The programs in the WBStartup drawer are executed after opening up the Workbench, i.e. when "loadwb" is executed. Unfortunately I cannot determine the order of execution here. My problem was the starting of some commands in user-startup. As we now, the user-startup script is called by run, thus executed in background. So the execution of programs called by startup-sequence is not over yet. I never could determine which of these made me trouble but I guess it was some of those in WBStartup as loadwb is called shortly after user-startup normally.

[scholle]

The speed aspect is obvious: When you have lots of programs in WBStartup AND a big user-startup, there's a good chance that they are executed in parallel which means lots of hard drive access back and forth. I prefer a single stream of program calls. Of course starting programs from WBStartup is not faster than starting from user-startup in general. The method you described would be the other side of solving my early problem. A matter of taste...

[scholle]

@Karlos: Damned, you are right, man! Only just I compared my old startup-sequence against a standard one. What the ####ing install program inserted the RUN >NIL: EXECUTE S:user-startup in my own startup-sequence instead of simply executing! I swear it was not me. It had caused me so much trouble and I always thought it had to be that way! THX!!!