Bug#727708: upstart proposed policy in Debian

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Colin Watson writes ("Re: Bug#727708: upstart proposed policy in Debian"):
> On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 01:36:59PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > How will we cope with removed-but-not-purged services ?
> 
> Somebody else can perhaps provide a better answer, but I'd note that
> this situation will generally just result in a log file complaining that
> the executable in question doesn't exist (and of course the service
> never reaching the "running" state, but that was expected), which isn't
> particularly awful.

Right.  So is the current practice just to ignore this problem and
tolerate the errors in the logs ?

> > Do we deprecate "expect fork" and "expect daemon" ?  (I would favour
> > this - the approach there is pretty horrible.)
> 
> [lots of stuff]

Exactly.

>  and it requires no particularly exciting code in the init daemon
> since finding out about SIGSTOP already basically comes with the
> territory of being pid 1.

It comes with being the daemon's parent, even - the special powers of
pid 1 aren't even needed.

> I think we'd have to do some work to modify existing Upstart jobs to
> conform to this, but I also think that work would be worthwhile, as
> "expect fork" and "expect daemon" have been a bit flaky and they're a
> bit of an obstacle (perhaps not an insurmountable one) to porting to
> non-Linux kernels.

Yes.

Thanks,
Ian.