Re:Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available
by JdeBP on Thursday May 10, 2018 @05:00PM
(#17042926)
That is not actually true. It is of course parsed by a shell, not by a shell script, which is indeed an "ELF blob".
Moreover, that shell is, on some operating systems, only one of the parsers. OpenBSD, for example, introduced a rule a few versions ago that rc.conf is not shell script. It is a set of key=value assignments that can be written and read by other programs too, not just by a full shell parser and not requiring a shell script parser.
One such program is rcctl. Another is FreeBSD's sysrc.
Re:Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available
by andrewshadura on Thursday May 10, 2018 @06:43AM
(#17037722)
But do you need to?
My guess: because the "another application" that parses nginx_enable=YES is a (rc) shell script instead of an ELF blob, so you can track its execution.