How does a post-start script know the main script has died?

[upstart at eehouse.org]

I'm launching dbus via an upstart job.  To prevent later jobs from
being launched before the daemon is ready to handle connection
requests I have a post-start script that polls for the existance of
dbus-daemon's unix domain socket in /proc/net/tcp, breaking out of a
loop when the socket appears.  When this works jobs that 'start on
started dbus' don't spawn until the socket is available.

But when dbus-daemon crashes, the post-start script runs forever.
(No, I can't just respawn dbus, but doing so doesn't seem to fix the
problem.)  I'd like the post-start script to detect that dbus has
died.  I can grep for the string 'stop' in the output of 'initcdl list
dbus' but that's gross: is there a better way?  Am I misunderstanding
upstart to think that it should kill or at least signal the post-start
script itself in this case?

We're running 0.3.8, BTW.  Our build system with its ancient autoconf
can't handle anything newer.

Thanks,

--Eric
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