BoF Protocol

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

thanks for your interest.

Am Dienstag, den 12.06.2007, 22:01 +0200 schrieb Sven Mueller:
> Joachim Breitner schrieb:
> > I have put up the notes from the BoF at
> > http://wiki.debian.org/MetaInit
> > 
> > Comments welcome. I’ll start creating some code here soon, I’ll keep you
> > updated. People who want to help hacking are _very_ welcome.
> 
> The consensus on wether scripts are generated at build or install time
> isn't very clear. Does "workstation side" mean the install time generation?

Yes. We agreed that we have very similar requirements that the menu
system does (several packages providing source snippets, several
packages needing the data from them in some format), so unless there are
reasons not to do so, we’d like to do it similar to that. So yeas,
install time of either daemon packages or init system packages.

> Regarding the features that should be supported, while I agree that
> "restart" can easily be done by stop+start, reload should be supported
> wherever possible. Be it by specifying a signal (which probably needs a
> way to find the actual daemon's PID if start is done by a short script
> fragment) or by touching a special file (yes, I have seen the later on
> several occasions, especially when the "daemon" is written in a script
> language, including shell). However, if the metainit tools allow
> overriding the generated script by an init-system specific script, a
> simple signal should suffice.

The idea is that we only want to support simple cases. Most daemons can
be made reload their config by sending a SIGHUP or some other signal, so
we agreed to cover that case. Daemons that have other ways of signalling
a reload (rndc reload, apachectl graceful) are intentionally (at the
moment) not covered, and they should just ship hand-crafted init scripts
as before.

> generated files are deleted when exactly? the sentence on the wiki page
> doesn't make sense to me. I suspect you meant to delete generated files
> for an init system when the init system is removed or purged and all
> generated files from a package when the package is removed or purged.
> Right?

It is not completely clear yet. Consensus was that the generated files
are deleted when the daemon is removed (even when not purged). Other
cases have to be discussed. Especially the case of a daemon upgrading to
a new version that does not use metainit any more, when the user has
modified the metainit file :-)

> Does the meta init system always generate all scripts for all
> supported init systems or just for those currently installed?

Just those installed, as they are likely to ship their own “translation”
scripts.

Greetings,
Joachim
-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
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