New profiles spec

[Scott James Remnant]

On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 07:19 +0100, Alex Smith wrote:

> I wrote a new draft of the Profiles spec from some discussion on IRC. 
> I'd like to know of any improvements and/or problems you can think of 
> for it. Over this weekend I'll try to implement it in my own branch.
> 
> The spec is here: http://upstart.ubuntu.com/wiki/Profiles
> 
Some comments:

The config file syntax isn't very Upstartish...  Perhaps something a bit
more like:

 /etc/init/profiles.d/no-x:
   enable *
   disable gdm
   disable kdm
   disable xdm
   disable ldm

Rather than the ini-ish syntax?  Remember that " " and "=" are valid
characters in a job name <g>

This would be easier to program since you could just use nih/config to
parse it with an "enable" or "disable" stanza.


Any particular reason why we need "bootprofile=" on the kernel
command-line.  Since the arguments are passed to Upstart directly
anyway, we could use the names of profiles directly:

  root=/dev/hda1 quiet splash no-x no-network

(And then we can even have "quiet" and "splash" profiles for free <g>)


What set of profiles would be the "default"?  If everything enabled, are
profiles mostly being used to just disable groups of services?  If the
default has some things disabled, how do we define what they are, and
how are they enabled again?

Could profiles be groups of services; and thus enabled or disabled?  You
could define a "networking" profile that has the list of services that
are networking-related, if the profile is "enabled" then these can be
run, if it is "disabled" then they cannot be.


Can only one profile be enabled at a time?  It might be interesting to
think about profile combinations; since "no-x" and "no-network" are
quite common suggestions there.  And "recovery" might be a combination
profile of several things.


If just one profile can be enabled at a time, it makes sense for it to
be just "initctl profile PROFILE" (switch is needless); if multiple can,
perhaps "initctl enable PROFILE" and "initctl disable PROFILE" ?

Scott
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?
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