Comment 16 for bug 363271

> In System V, the only services missing in single user mode compared to
> multi-user mode are login services, such as getty, gdm, sshd, etc. It's
> not intended as a "recovery" mode.

Well, I'll admit that I come from a mostly BSD background. I had no idea that sysV used runlevel 1 like that, or that ubuntu wanted to be like sysV for the sake of being like sysV. AFAIK, It's been a long time since debian or ubuntu used runlevels 3-5 for anything, which leaves us with runlevel 2 = multiuser, runlevel 1 = single user / root shell / whatev.

To me, single user mode / init 1 / whatever is where you go to kick users off the machine and do maintenance, repairs, etc. In the BSDs (even darwin) I can boot to single user mode and fsck / without issue. I essentially just get a root shell, and that's how I likes it. I'm willing to accept that I'm atypical, but having a way to offer the user recovery options proactively, not just after something is hosed, is a useful innovation which should be preserved.

And I would point out that with the same type of brush that you declare most people wind up in friendly recovery when root is read only, I could much more easily declare that people with /usr on a network mount (or even any seperate mountpoint from /) are so few and far between that they are hardly worth considering.

But your point about having daemons running does have some truth to it, and to answer that, I don't see why the functionality of friendly recovery couldn't be whittled down to things that can be put in a single binary located on /, statically linked with ncurses and whatever else necessary to get these sorts of common tasks done.

I just think it's a very useful innovation to display a little ncurses menu with common maintenance options before dropping a potentially new user, unguided, at a root shell.

Cheers,
Brian