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Bug#727708: upstart user jobs



Hi Ian,

On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 12:31:57PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> I have some questions about these.  Forgive me if I could just have
> looked up the answers:

> Are they enabled by default in jessie/sid ?
> (If the answer is "no" then feel free not to answer the rest...)

"No" :)

Using upstart user jobs in Debian would imply a whole added level of
transition above and beyond adoption of upstart as init, and would require
coordination with maintainers of e.g. desktop environment packages and
display manager packages.  I think it would be a logical next step for
Debian to consider, if it adopted upstart as a default; but so long as
upstart is not the default in Debian I don't think it would be a good idea
to try to support this in Debian.

> In the manpage I read:
>   | Note that a user job configuration file cannot have the same name
>   | as a system job configuration file.
> I don't understand this restriction.  It's sounds like it's referring
> to the pathnames in which case it's trivially true, so I assume it's
> referring to job names.

Hmm, this sounds like a documentation bug, a throwback to an earlier
iteration of the user job support.  Which manpage did you find this in?

The current implementation certainly has no such restriction.  For instance,
on an Ubuntu system there are both /etc/init/dbus.conf and
/usr/share/upstart/sessions/dbus.conf, for the system bus and the session
bus respectively, and these do not collide.  System-level events are visible
to the user session, but they are qualified with a disambiguating ":sys:"
prefix.

> Does anything that user jobs do depend on upstart being pid 1, or
> being root ?  Does the thing which reads (and watches) the user's
> configuration files run as root, or as the user ?  I.e., what is the
> privilege separation ?

The upstart "session init" runs as the user, not as root.  I'm not sure if
upstart as a user session has any dependencies on upstart being PID 1. 
Cc:ing James, who would know better - James, do you know if upstart session
init works on non-upstart systems?

> The docs say:
>  | Files in this directory will be read and an inotify(7) watch
>  | created the first time a user runs initctl(8).
> Does this really mean that if I'm fiddling around with writing some
> jobs, but not quite ready yet, and say "initctl --help", my jobs will
> start to run ?  Also, it would appear to imply that user jobs aren't
> started automatically at boot.

This seems to be a quote from the 1.6.1 version of the manpage, in wheezy. 
The user session support in the current releases of upstart (the only
implementation that's been used in production in Ubuntu) doesn't work this
way; and the manpage has been updated to match.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org

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