Bug#727708: upstart user jobs

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

Steve Langasek writes ("Re: Bug#727708: upstart user jobs"):
> 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.

I'm not sure I see the connection.  AIUI user jobs are a way to do
roughly what cron's @reboot facility does, only better.

> > 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?

http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=init&sektion=5&apropos=0&manpath=Debian+testing+jessie&locale=

> > 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.

OK, good, thanks.

Ian.