A few more questions about Upstart

[Scott James Remnant]

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 20:36 +0000, Alex Smith wrote:

> There are a few questions I have about Upstart. The first is about logd 
> - I noticed that in Upstart 0.3.0, the logd behaviour changed so that it 
> does not output to the console at all. The only alternative is to do 
> "console output" in each job file. If you do that, it doesn't get logged 
> to /var/log/boot. Is there any way to have it log to the console and the 
> bootlog, and also how would I go about changing the default logd behaviour?
> 
logd is still very much looking for a purpose at the moment; it was
about to have a severe case of feature creep, so I prematurely stopped
that and limited it until I know what it's supposed to do.

Right now it's vaguely a replacement for bootlogd, I didn't want to get
to the point where it was starting to become a replacement for syslog as
well!


In Ubuntu, we decided that having the init script output on the console
wasn't much use -- when there's an error message, it's a bug, but it's
almost impossible for the user to capture that precisely and get it into
the bug report.  "Please attach /var/log/boot" is much easier.

Obviously we still want a way to get certain messages to the console,
and we currently do that through the use of the LSB shell functions
which output there directly.

I think this is the right approach long-term too, upstart job authors
should not worry about hiding output from daemons, scripts, etc. and
instead allow it to flow freely into the system log files.  Where a
problem occurs, they should use a special function or binary that gets
given a descriptive message -- this binary can translate that message
and display it through whatever means is appropriate (splash screen,
console, system log, etc.)


logd itself would simply receive the standard output/error from the jobs
and direct it to the appropriate system logging facility, perhaps on a
per-job basis.  This may be improved by using something less primitive
than syslog?  Alternatively one could grow logd to a complete syslog
replacement, but at that point it's probably worth splitting off into a
separate companion source.

> The second question - Frugalware uses Splashy 
> (http://splashy.alioth.debian.org) to provide the bootup splash screen. 
> How would I get support for this in Upstart?
> 
There's no particular support either way, we haven't done this for
usplash yet.  My vague inkling is to have something subscribe to upstart
job announcements ("initctl jobs") and output to the splash screen.

> The last is about the status program. "initctl list" reports that tty1 
> is running, yet "status tty1" outputs nothing. Any ideas why this happens?
> 
None, you're running as root, yes?  It's possible that 0.3 is broken :-/
Please file a bug; include strace output of initctl

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/upstart-devel/attachments/20061102/85508ff9/attachment.pgp