[ANNOUNCE] upstart 0.3.7 released

[Scott James Remnant]

This primary focus on this release was improving the IPC protocol
between upstart and initctl, which is also intended to be used between
future programs such as upstart-dbus-proxy.

Internally the way processes are handled has changed quite a bit; rather
than having a single pid field (and aux_pid for post-start/pre-stop)
each possible process has its own structure containing a pid field, and
these are all stored in an array.  This makes internal handling much
easier, and makes it trivial to implement custom actions later.

I also took the opportunity to do some more cleaning up, so there's a
few config stanza changes; and the underlying code for handling the exec
and script stanzas is now the same.

A new examples jobs (4) has been released with this version.


  * The "normalexit" stanza has been changed to "normal exit".

  * The "respawn COMMAND" short-cut for specifying both "respawn" and
    "exec" in the same stanza has been removed.  Jobs that previously
    used syntax such as:

	respawn /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

    Should be changed to use:

	exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1
	respawn

    While the shortcut saved a little typing, it caused confusion and
    hid the fact that "exec" and "script" were both options for
    respawning services.

  * The "on EVENT" stanza has been removed, change your jobs to use the
    identical "start on EVENT" instead.  This is because the "on" stanza
    may be useful for other things in future.

  * Stanzas in job definitions may no longer be surrounded by single or
    double quotes, allowing them to be turned into ordinary tokens by
    quoting them.

  * Configuration of running jobs is no longer immediately changed when
    the definition is changed on disk; the job must be stopped first. 
    If the job is an instance job, all instances must be stopped before
    an instance of the changed job definition will be started.

    This ensures that the post-stop process run when the job is stopped
    matches the pre-start process run when it was started, and for
    instance jobs ensures that any locking between them is identical.

    Jobs marked for deletion, or jobs that have not yet replaced
    another, will not ordinarily show up in the output of initctl
    "status" or "list" unless addressed by id.  They cannot be started
    or stopped, even when addressed by id.

  * Job definitions may safely omit "exec"/"script"; the job will stay
    in the running state with no process until it is stopped manually or
    by an event.

    This allows a service to define hardware configuration; for example
    the mixer service could restore the ALSA mixer in its pre-start
    script and save the mixer state in its stop script.  "start mixer"
    would restore the state, "status mixer" would show it was running
    and "stop mixer" would save the state again and presumably mute it.

  * Sending the SIGPWR signal to init will emit the power-status-changed
    event.  A simple job can hook this event, check the /etc/powerstatus
    file and take further action.

  * As well as their name, all jobs now also have a unique id exported
    in the UPSTART_JOB_ID environment variable and viewable with initctl
    by using the "--show-ids" option to "status" or "list".

    The unique id is changed whenever the job is reloaded from disk, or
    whenever a new instance is started.  "start" and "stop" now default
    to UPSTART_JOB_ID if no arguments are given (falling back to
    UPSTART_JOB if that is not present either).  This means they act on
    the current instance of the job, rather than spawning a new instance
    or stopping all instances.

    "start", "status" and "stop" also accept a new "--by-id" option
    which makes them expect job ids as arguments instead of job names.

  * The initctl "status" and "list" commands group instances of instance
    jobs together in their output, rather than repeating them without
    further clarification.  E.g.:

	foo (instance)
	    (start) starting
	    (start) running, process 1000
	    (stop) post-stop, process 1050

    The "stop" command will stop all instances when given the name of an
    instance job; individual instances can be stopped using "--by-id"
    after obtaining the id from "status --show-ids".

  * Wildcard patterns of job names to be listed can be given as an
     argument to the initctl "list" command.

  * Starting and stopping jobs with initctl will now block until the job
    reaches its goal state, outputting all status changes and process
    ids until the goal is reached and will also output an error and exit
    with a non-zero status if the job fails.

    Remember that jobs default to being tasks, so "start" will actually
    block until the job finishes and returns back to "(stop) waiting". 
    Use the "service" or "respawn" stanza to turn them into services to
    that they only block until the "(start) running" state is reached.


The tarball can be found here:

        http://upstart.ubuntu.com/download/

For more information on upstart:

        http://upstart.ubuntu.com/

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