What does “Caching service dependencies …” mean?

Question

When I shut down Tomcat I get the following:

* Caching service dependencies...                 [ ok ]
* Stopping Tomcat...                              [ !! ]

What does Caching service dependencies mean?

Answer 1

Are you using Gentoo? When you stop a service, Baselayout checks if there are other services depending on the service you are stopping. If it is the case, they are stopped before, in order of dependencies.

Whenever you restart a service in a distro based on Baselayout, it runs the /sbin/depscan.sh script, which stores dependencies in /var/lib/init.d/depcache. You will observe however that the message is not always printed. That's because while depscan.sh is run each time, it only creates a new cache if any file in /etc/rc.d/, /etc/conf.d/or the file /etc/rc.conf is changed.

For more details, refer to the script itself.