upstart question

[Benjamin Montgomery]

Hi all, I need some help on a use case for upstart that I am
considering.  Here is what I'm looking at:

I have a laptop that I sometimes use for development of web
applications.  The laptop has apache and mysql installed.  I don't want
those daemons running all of the time, only when I need them to test out
some code.  I want to start/stop these daemons from a gnome applet
sitting in the notification area.

This seemed like a really easy thing to code up until I remembered that
you need root privs to start and stop apache and mysql.  I don't want to
be root when I log in, and I don't want the applet to be suid to root.
Network Manager runs a seperate daemon with root privileges to solve
this problem, but that seems overkill for what I want to do.

Upstart seems to have the potential to solve this problem, but I'm have
a couple of questions that I haven't been able to find the answers:

* Can I tell upstart to allow certain users or groups to start or stop
certain jobs?
* How do I create a new upstart job to manage the apache and mysql
processes?

Any help would be appreciated.

Ben