Bug#727708: Value of reading other's position statements [was: systemd vs. whatever]
Dear Mr. Urlichs,
You wrote:
> One non-feature of upstart which I happen to care strongly about is its
> use of ptrace(2) to figure out what a job is doing. This destroys any
> attempt to just use "strace foo" as the job, if one really needs to
> figure out what a piece of software is doing wrong. Thanks but no
> thanks.
Let me allow to quote the upstart's position statement:
> The systemd position statement asserts that you can't attach gdb to a
> process run by the init system. This is not true, and can only be
> speculation on the part of the systemd proponents: ptrace is only used
> during service startup, after which upstart detaches from the process
> (relying on ordinary waitpid() for notification of service exit). This
> means that for all intents and purposes, by the time you would actually be
> in a position to try to attach to the process with gdb, upstart will no
> longer be tracing it. For valgrind, it's true that this would be less
> straightforward to do as part of an upstart job. If there were widespread
> demand for solving this, it wouldn't be difficult; but this doesn't seem
> like something that has much practical impact. It's unlikely that someone
> using valgrind for debugging will need to debug via an upstart job or
> systemd unit, as opposed to running the service directly.
(Cf. https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/upstart)
HTH, HAND
– Mirosław Baran
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