Re: migration away from /etc/init.d/ style to supervision style?

[Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org>]

Adam Megacz dijo [Tue, May 29, 2007 at 04:57:17PM -0700]:
> I've recently moved all of my machines to runit, and I've been
> immensely pleased with the results.  In particular, the process
> supervision, clean process state, uniform and well-organized logging,
> elimination of pidfiles, and general simplicity of the whole system
> has been wonderful.
> (...)
> So, my main question: has there been any consideration given to moving
> official debian policy from /etc/init.d and start-stop-daemon to a
> supervision-based system like runit or daemontools?
> 
> I understand that there are several solutions in this category
> (another is daemontools, but I believe that its licensing situation is
> not acceptable for debian).  This question is not specific to runit --
> more of a general inquiry about the type of solution it is
> representative of.

Hi,

This does not surprise me at all, and it does encourage me :) I wanted
to be a bit more active on this, but so far, I've got only some ideas
- I can just hope we can get something drafted while working on a
higher-bandwidth medium (i.e. on a real-life meeting).

We had some interesting posts some weeks ago on Debian Planet - The
ones I've noted are:

http://blog.incase.de/index.php/2007/04/13/init-hackfest-new-init-systems-in-debian/

http://web.glandium.org/blog/?p=126

http://gwolf.org/index.php?gadget=Blog&action=SingleView&id=Init-followup

http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/archives/231-Debian-Ideas-Instance-Capable-Init-Scripts.html

http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/2007041001-system-init-part1.html

http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/2007041101-system-init-part2.html

http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/2007041202-system-init-part3.html

http://gwolf.org/index.php?gadget=Blog&action=SingleView&id=On-system-init-schemes

http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/2007041301-init-followup.html

http://blog.incase.de/index.php/2007/04/17/init-script-generators/

http://wiki.debian.org/HackFests/Init

...So I proposed the following BoF session for Debconf:

    There are several different init systems present in Debian -
    However, we are only supporting currently one of them, good ol'
    sysv-rc - We have close to a thousand packages providing init
    scripts suitable for it, and close to none for all of the other
    systems. 

    In current systems, full of hot-pluggable devices, changing network
    configurations and so on, however, I think this situation is quite
    prone to change - sysv-rc and its runlevels are better suited for
    stable server-like systems, and is hard to adapt for future needs.

    We will talk about the potential difficulties Debian will face in
    order to better support more init schemes, and discuss some ideas
    to solve them.

    This should be a brainstorming session, not much material will be
    prepared (maybe some sketches by each of us, but nothing
    formal). If you plan on attending, take a look at the messages
    linked to in the 'links' section.

So... Where is the complexity? In that Debian will not just switch
from one scheme to a different one. We will continue providing several
schemes. But what we want to work on (and I must first of all
recognize I'm by no means an expert on this topic!) is a way to
provide hooks to probably be able to generate the needed scripts for
at least most of our packages, most of the init schemes. Explicitly
providing init schemes for the complete combination is... Well, just
not going to happen :) 

Stay tuned - I invite you to participate in this BoF. I don't know yet
if all/some/this BoFs will be streamed during Debconf or not, but if
so, I hope everybody interested can tune in and take part via IRC or
so.

Greetings,

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
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