It's a general truism in software development that metrics are oftendangerous, because people will naturally work to what you pay attentionto (to summarize). If you pay attention to bugs closed, people closebugs; if you pay attention to lines of code written, people write code.The dangers inherent in this are hopefully obvious.

(In fact it happens outside of software development too; consider allof the schools that are busy 'teaching to the test', because variousstandardized tests have become so important

One aspect of yesterday's problem is a littleordering issue between /etc/inittab and stuff in /etc/rc.d . Namely:

Everything in /etc/rc.d runs before other things in /etc/inittab really takes effect.

(The paths here are for Red Hat; elsewhere, what Red Hat puts in /etc/rc.d is just put straight into /etc , so you have /etc/init.d and /etc/rc3.d and so on