systemd .service file conversion

[Helmut Grohne]

Dear upstart developers,

debian-devel at l.d.o has been talking about socket activation interfaces.
The technical differences are nicely summarized:

On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 08:53:52PM +0200, Zbigniew J??drzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> But chronology is less important then the technical differences between
> the two interfaces.
> 
> In systemd a socket activated process gets the variable $LISTEN_FDS
> and sockets as file descriptors 3, 4, ..., $LISTEN_FDS-1 [1].
> The interface is very generic.
> 
> In upstart the process gets one socket, with the number given in
> the variable $UPSTART_FDS [2]. The naming (a) doesn't make sense since
> there's only one socket, (b) is tied to upstart, and (c) there's only
> one socket.
> 
> The limitation to one socket is quite constraining, e.g. we like
> apache to listen on both 80 and 443, and the requirement for apache to
> open the second port itselfs makes it impossible to start apache
> unpriviledged.
> 
> Zbyszek
> 
> [1] http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/sd_listen_fds.html#Description
> [2] http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man7/socket-event.7.html

Is there any chance for upstart to adopt the socket activation interface
from systemd? As has been pointed out above, the interface is more
generic. Having upstart and systemd differentiate on interfaces does not
serve any good. Instead upstart could benefit from daemons already
supporting systemd style socket activation. Having one interface to
socket activation would greatly reduce the amount of integration work to
be done by distributions such as Debian. I am aware that this is kind of
a bike shedding discussion. The value to be gained is the uniformity
though.

If this is not possible, please briefly lay out the reason (or point to
previous discussion of this matter).

Thanks in advance

Helmut