[Please CC me in replies, I am currently not subscribed to -devel]. On Saturday 05 September 2009 01:21:00 pm Petter Reinholdtsen wrote: > The plan is to > change upstart to actually use /etc/inittab, to ease the switch > between sysvinit and upstart.
<potential flame> Please don't. As you correctly pointed out, the current Debian init architecture is one of the most painful and outdated (not to say broken) parts in the whole system. It's really time to move away from old cruft (and I consider inittab to be cruft of little use at this time) and start using something that will not cause more pain in the future. </potential flame> There is definitely a need to support inittab during the transition period, but this can be done like the file-rc package has been doing for years: with conversion scripts to and from the old format, supporting those legacy features that make sense but not committed to care for every corner case. Leave those (probably multiple-100-lines perl/shell beasts) in place for a couple of years, declare inittab deprecated with squeeze (or squeeze+1), and remove afterwards. I would also _strongly_ suggest to do another iteration over all init scripts and mandate the implementation of a "status" command as well as parameters to "start" (or add a "start-nofork" command or something like that) to start the service with exec instead of fork. This would pave the way for using daemon/service supervision in the future (e.g. using upstart and deferring to standard init scripts to implement its native event.d files), and thus for more robust embedded systems support. Full ack for all other points in your mail, though. I have been using upstart on the current beta and upcoming release of Gibraltar firewall as well as all my Debian servers for the better part of 1 1/2 years and have not had any issues with it so far. best regards, Rene
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