Re: Debian packages and upstart jobs

[Kel Modderman <kel@otaku42.de>]

On Saturday 12 December 2009 07:07:21 Russ Allbery wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> One of the packages I maintain, OpenAFS, is a network file system.  As
> such, one generally wants it to start before things like gdm that need to
> read the user's home directory.  However, in Ubuntu, gdm is started by
> upstart instead of an init script, and all init scripts are run after the
> native upstart jobs are run.
> 
> The best way to address this for Ubuntu would be to introduce an upstart
> job for OpenAFS.  However, the package is in universe and hence
> preferrably shared between Ubuntu and Debian.
> 
> Is there any reason why it would cause problems for me to add an upstart
> job to the Debian package, even though Debian doesn't currently use
> upstart?  (I realize that the logic around deactivating the init script if
> upstart is present may be a bit complex, but I suspect we can find ways of
> dealing with that.)  I assume the job just sit there quiescent until
> Debian switches to upstart.

debehlper >= 7.4.1 contains an implementation of dh_installinit which takes
care of debian/$package.upstart (and debian/$package.$name.upstart when called
with --name= parameter) by installing the job(s) to /etc/init.d/ with a
symlink from /etc/init.d/$jobfile -> /lib/init/upstart-job. It also adds
'upstart-job' to the substvars in misc:Depends.

The status of 'upstart-job' is unknown to me, which raises my concern that
Debian boot system may not be ready for upstart jobs when they are installed
by dh_installinit.

Thanks, Kel.