[ubuntu-us-ut] Grievances: Upstart, Launchpad, and Misuse of anacron

Aaron Toponce aaron.toponce at gmail.com
Mon Sep 13 21:07:56 BST 2010


On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 12:48:17PM -0600, Charles Curley wrote:
> Why do Debian and Ubuntu have this screwy setup where cron calls
> anacron if it is present? Let anacron run at boot and otherwise let
> crontab do things.

First, let's make it unequivically clear that the cron daemon Debian is
using, as well as most other GNU/Linux operating systems, is heavily,
_heavily_ patched. The reason for this is Paul Vixie has stopped
updating it years ago. So, Ubuntu moving anacron, cron and at into
Upstart makes tons of sense.

Second, can you be more explicit in what you mean "Debian and Ubuntu
have this screwy setup where cron calls anacron"? There does exist an
/etc/cron.daily/0anacron file, but this is so anacron can update the
timestamps to know what has been run and what hasn't. Further, anacron
does start on boot, as is evident by the /etc/init.d/anacron config.

> upstart is a mess. Give me good old System V startup code. I understand
> how it works and can make it do what it wants. I find upstart opaque
> and confusing.

I'll clarify it for you: Upstart is a push service. The big difference
between Upstart and SysV is when an event is created, a service will
start. With Upstart, if there are services that depend on the started
service, it will start those too.

However, the service(s) will remain running, unless you've configured
upstart to stop services on an inverse event, say pulling the USB disk
from the port.

Right now, Ubuntu hasn't taken full advantage of what Upstart can
deliver. They've been playing it safe with SysV backwards compatibility
mode, as has Fedora.

> And launchpad is a slow opaque buggy mess. I've used a lot of issue
> tracking tools, and launchpad is far and away the worst. Let's start
> with a useless search that returns far to many false hits. I have pretty
> much quit filing bugs partly because launchpad is so user hostile.

Yeah, I'm not really digging Launchpad. I've always been curious what
the point of karma was, why the navigation sucks so bad, and why the
Ubuntu wiki forces you to use the Launchpad OpenID, rather than an
existing OpenID account that you've already had.

I do understand why bzr came to be though. At the time, there just
weren't any reliable or real solid distributed versioning control
systems. Git wasn't invented, and Mercurial was resource intensive, and
slow as hell. Others didn't deliver the features Canonical wanted.

> Also management: apparently some of the people using launchpad don't
> know how to use an issue tracking system, so issues that should be
> marked closed aren't, etc.

I'm of the opinion that submitting bugs shouldn't be particularly easy
or available. While making bug submissions easily accessible, you risk
getting really lame bugs submitted (Ubuntu brainstorm anyone?) or
nothing more than "+1" and "me too" comments. When you make it a hassle
to submit bugs and to comment on them, then the noise to signal ratio
decreases immensely.

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