hardy init script status action

[Mathias Gug]

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 01:57:07PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> 
> What is the motivation for making this change during feature freeze?  I'm
> not aware of any policy that requires Ubuntu init scripts to conform to the
> current LSB init script specification?
> 

Using the LSB argument to back this request has been a bad choice. Let's
remove this from the discussion.

The problem we're trying to fix is that not having a status action in a
init script responsible for managing a daemon is *really* annoying.
We've heard sysadmin complaining about the lack of status for daemons
such as apache2 or sshd.

So here is a proposal for Hardy:
 * Add a status action to the init script for the following 9 packages:
    apache2, at, bind9, cron, samba, dovecot, openssh, sysklogd, udev
   These packages are mainly server related - they are all available from 
   the ubuntu-server iso.
 * The logic would be defined in each init script, depending on the use
   of a pid file, a socket or another method used by the init script to
   start/stop the daemon. That means no change to the lsb package.

Testing this new feature is straightforward.

I'd like to get this include in Hardy as it's something that we're
missing when compared to other distros - we're just playing catch up
here.

Even if we'll use a different solution in Intrepid, Hardy will be around
for a couple of years and would lack a feature that other distros
provide and is useful to sysadmins.

-- 
Mathias Gug
Ubuntu Developer  http://www.ubuntu.com