A few more questions about Upstart

[Alex Smith]

Scott James Remnant wrote:
> 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!

Yes, of course. That would be reinventing the wheel :-)

> 
> 
> 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.

Yes, I see the point in this, but how about being able to log to both 
the log file and the console so that users can see what's being done as 
the system is booting up as well.

> 
> 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.

Ok, I'll wait to find out what you decide to do with Usplash. I think 
just a small job like logd that runs and passes the information to the 
splash would work, or not?

> 
>> 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

Done. It's bug #69908

> 
> Scott


-- 
Alex Smith
Frugalware Linux developer - http://www.frugalware.org