In single user mode, anything but the bare system is being shut down already, so you don't have to care about fancy stuff like disk monitoring daemons etc., as they are not running anymore in this run level. Single user mode is practically init running with a console driver and a block device driver, that's it (practically speaking) - I admit I'm not a linux kernel guru, but that's it from a user's point of view.
We don't even have either a console or block device driver, nor any kind of monitoring daemons. This kind of thing is done properly and integrated in the system. For example, each time you create a file, the filesystem api itself handles monitoring, indexing of attributes, sending notifications to apps that are watching for change on the file. This means the system is a lot faster, use less processes, but also it is less difficult to remove this part. And you don't want to anyway, the kernel would be unable to manage its drivers without it.
We do have a console boot prompt, but who want to run in such a degraded mode ? it would be like booting windows in failsafe mode each time you want to install a new driver or update a dll. It's just simpler to boot from a cd or usb key and run the install from there. Still not a perfect solution, but it at least keeps the 3-click way Haiku is meant to be installed.
I would be happy with a pre-boot kernel-level update-script that downloads the current Haiku image from the net in PXE fashion, expands it and boots from the new install... what do the system devs think?
We have PXE boot support. It does just that. -- Adrien Destugues / PulkoMandy http://pulkomandy.ath.cx
