Local job changes

[Jürg Billeter]

Hi,

I've experimented a bit with upstart in my distribution and it seems to
be a really good approach and the features of the upcoming 0.3 look
promising, so thanks for all the work so far. Let's hope that later
releases will be integrated in many distros.

One point I haven't seen discussed so far is ensuring that changes to
jobs by administrators integrate well with package management of the
distro. The most important change for admins is probably
enabling/disabling jobs but there might be more changes desired.
Currently you can just delete a job file (or set it to disabled with the
patch from Jοhan Kiviniemi) to disable a job easily. This method doesn't
fit well with package updates, though. Depending on the policy of the
package manager, distro or local changes to the job files might get
lost.

A possible solution might be to introduce two event/job directories, one
for distro-supplied jobs and one for local changes or additions. The
distro directory could be moved to /lib to emphasize that these jobs
should only be touched by distro packages. The local directory remains
in /etc and would be empty after fresh installation. Job files in the
local directory extend/modify jobs in the distro directory with the same
filename. Often they would just contain one line to override whether the
job is enabled or disabled but they could also e.g. change the arguments
of a daemon.

Does that make sense or has somebody else already thought of an
other/better solution?

Regards,

Jürg