[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] startpar support for upstart

Kel Modderman kel at otaku42.de
Wed Oct 19 07:39:36 UTC 2011


Hey Steve,

> On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 07:55:52AM +1000, Kel Modderman wrote:
> > On Sun, 16 Oct 2011 10:16:01 AM Steve Langasek wrote:
> > > Hi folks,
> 
> > > Pursuant to bug #591791 against Debian Policy about permitting alternate
> > > init systems in Debian, I've prepared a patch against sysvinit which would
> > > make startpar aware that a given job is implemented as an upstart job
> > > instead of a SysV init script and that startpar should defer to upstart to
> > > satisfy the dependency.
> 
> > > This enables insserv/startpar-based dependency boot to be used for sysvinit
> > > in conjunction with upstart as /sbin/init and native upstart jobs as
> > > dependencies, and is the first step towards having upstart be genuinely
> > > usable on Debian.  It also rolls back the previous /lib/init/upstart-job
> > > approach, which never worked right with startpar due to the inability to
> > > express dependency information.  As a result, packages shipping upstart jobs
> > > should now ship real init scripts in parallel (per the policy bug
> > > discussion), which means some changes to debhelper are wanted before this
> > > goes into effect.
> 
> > Does this mean that the upstart code (to do with /lib/init/upstart-job) in
> > insserv should be removed alongside this new development?
> 
> Yes, we would eventually phase that out in favor of the handling on the
> startpar side.  We would have to keep /lib/init/upstart-job around for a
> while until no more packages in Ubuntu are using it, but the insserv changes
> for upstart-job could be dropped (since /lib/init/upstart-job never
> implemented the interface insserv was expecting, anyway).

Okay, will put that on the to-do list for next insserv upload.

> > * not sure the copyright statement of startpar.c should be changed
> 
> It's a non-trivial patch, so that's correct at least for the moment.  I
> don't know if Novell will want copyright assignment for this patch; I'll ask
> them about it as soon as I figure out where the correct upstream location is
> for this code :) (debian/copyright of sysvinit doesn't mention it)

Dr. Werner Fink <werner at suse.de> is the upstream author of startpar as far as
I knew it, but I am not aware of an upstream location for startpar. The latest
startpar source code is always in the factory src.rpm for sysvinit in the suse
src repo. <http://download.opensuse.org/source/factory/repo/oss/suse/src/>

At the time of writing the latest startpar source takes the form of 
startpar-0.57.tar.bz2 + startpar-0.57.dif extracted from
sysvinit-2.88+-64.1.src.rpm found at above URL.

I had been meaning to discuss what Werner thought about committing startpar
to savannah SVN alongside sysvinit and insserv, but as with many Debian
interests never got around to doing that while the focus was on improving
these (legacy) sysvinit boot utilities back in 2008/2009 and I had a line
of communication with Werner.

Thanks, Kel.



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