As far as I recall, until the plumbing was heavily redone a decade later or so, you could only push (propagate) an updated command line to replicas, not a separ

As far as I recall, until the plumbing was heavily redone a decade later or so, you could only push (propagate) an updated command line to replicas, not a separate file as well. On top of that, I vaguely remember something about bootstrapping and ensuring that the remaining flags and the flag file always be updated atomically, in lockstep. For regular Unix folks, imagine issuing a remote ssh command. You can't easily do that AND bundle an auxiliary data file at the same time.