Upstart information

[Scott James Remnant]

On Sun, 2006-08-27 at 18:02 +0000, Anders Aagaard wrote:

> I've seen bits and pieces about upstart, but very little concrete 
> information.  I saw a note on 
> initscripts-ng-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org and decided to go looking, 
> found only the launchpad page.
> 
That's probably only because the name has only been attached to it for a
short while.  There's a fair bit of additional information around, some
of the original documents are here:

  http://people.ubuntu.com/~scott/upstart/

which were used when proposing it for Ubuntu.  Later a specification was
written for Ubuntu edgy which was what was approved for implementation:

  http://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit

> I was wondering if there's a mailinglist/"one" place for information?  I 
> downloaded the upstart-0.1.1 package, hoping to find some event.d 
> scripts, but could only find one.
> 
Haven't managed to get a "home page" set up yet, it's on the TODO list
but somewhere below "implementing it" :p

There's a mailing list: upstart-devel at lists.netsplit.com which hasn't
achieved much traffic yet simply because it's not been advertised much,
other than to the people I originally sent the proposal to.

There aren't any event.d script examples yet because the format hasn't
been fixed (I only wrote the parser last week!)

> Do you intend on making your own making an event.d service for every 
> daemon/script?  How will stuff like checkroot/very customized daemons be 
> handled (things that "needs" script like functions).  And how will you 
> deal with staying backwards compatible?
> 
Yes, eventually every service and task would have an event.d file.
Things that need script-like functions can be written using the "script"
stanza, e.g.

	on startup

	script
		# shell script goes here
	end script

Staying backwards compatible is simple, it will run /etc/init.d/rc (as
the current Ubuntu package does).

> I was one of initng's main coders, but I stopped working on that 
> project, as I felt it got too big and complicated, and was in dire need 
> of a rewrite.  And I picked up some simple tricks there, for example 
> converting all startup scripts needing script like functions to POSIX sh 
> instead of bash (and then executing them in dash) increased performance 
> considerably.  So if your gonna run parts of the startup as a script, 
> you might want to make the default interpretor a POSIX shell (or 
> something completely different) rather than just using /bin/sh.
> 
In Ubuntu our /bin/sh is dash, so we've not encountered those speed
problems.  It has occurred that linking dash in and using it as a
library might be interesting to save an exec, but I haven't yet put much
thought into that.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at ubuntu.com
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