Bug#291148: Proposal

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Sat, 2012-05-12 at 23:10:50 +0300, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> So since no one had anything to add, here is a concrete proposal.  All
> of this reflects current practice, I believe.  Since the addition of
> status_of_proc to /lib/lsb/init-functions, this has been quite
> standardized in practice, and as I wrote earlier, more than half of the
> affected packages are already doing this.
> 
>       * Add "status" as an optional init script option (similar to
>         "reload").  No one objected to that.
>       * Require exit status 0 or not 0.  There were concerns about
>         anything more specific, and it's not necessary in practice, as
>         consumers of this generally only check for 0 or not 0.  Could be
>         refined in the future.
>       * Add footnote encouraging use of LSB exit statuses anyway.
>       * Add footnote about what "service is running" might mean.  Some
>         people in the discussion were concerned about this being
>         ambiguous, some were concerned about making it too specific.
>         The main nonhuman consumers of this interface are system
>         monitoring programs that will decide to run "start" if "status"
>         reports not running.  So it is reasonable to define the behavior
>         of "status" in terms of "start".
>       * Add something simple about console messages from status option.
>         That whole section seems to have been overtaken by reality, but
>         what I wrote is pretty close to it.

Just a quite note, start-stop-daemon got a --status command with LSB
semantics in dpkg 1.16.1.

thanks,
guillem