Upstart for Natty (was Re: manual start, upgrade and debhelper)

[Steffen Barszus]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2010 11:44:20 +0000
James Hunt <james.hunt at canonical.com> wrote:

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> Hi Alessandro,
> 
> On 15/12/10 11:20, Alessandro Bono wrote:
> > Hi all
> > 
> > with new upstart is possible to force manual start adding "manual"
> > to job configuration, but this is a modification of configuration
> > file like commenting out "start on"
> > on upgrade if package has a new configuration file dpkg suggest to
> > overwrite old one, so after upgrade I have to readd "manual" stanza
> > if I want new configuration file 
> > Is it correct?
> Yes, but the manual stanza is the first step towards supporting
> "override files", which will do what you want. See:
> 
>   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/Specs/MaverickFinishUpstart

This covers 98% of our problems with upstart we
(http://www.yavdr.org) have currently.  

Namely:
- starting by a socket 
- starting job as a specific user instead of root (user session?)
- depend on states on certain occassions, to prevent deadlocks on
  multiple dependcies of "events" 
- being able to generate graphs to visualize the boot process

Missing:
- possibility to make sure slow stopping servers finish before rc and
  those umountall happens. 
- Easy way of providing upstart jobs where ubuntu still delivers init.d
  scripts

Any suggestion on when one could start migration on the jobs in order
to be earliest possible up to speed with new upstart features ? Is this
list appropriate to discuss creation and maintenance of upstart jobs or
there will be a upstart-user mailing list ? Or some ubuntu mailing list
should be used for that. 

Thanks !

Steffen