On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 8:53 AM, Scott James Remnant <94...@bugs.launchpad.net> wrote: > Because, believe it or not, it's not a very common use case - in the > Debian and Ubuntu world, you're generally expected to uninstall > services you don't need.
Ah, but you want to use the service, you just don't want upstart to start it on startup. There are pretty common use cases in my workday. 1) Clustering Cluster resources should obviously be installed, but should not be started automatically, _especially_ on startup. First, the cluster management software (pacemaker) should control if a service is running or not to avoid resource contention. Typically this is done using the OCF scripts, but can be configured to use sysvinit, which more and more often on Ubuntu means its actually upstart. Further, if a passive node has failed and the system has rebooted, you do not want the service to start on that node until a root cause has been determined. It is too easy for someone to [finally] get a cluster working and not realize that the init system is going to try to start the process when they restart. I'm just arguing that it should be simple to disable service startup in that case. 2) Alternative process management Many people use daemontools or runit for process management of essential services, particularly instead of sysvinit. I see that upstart has process supervision, which is often one of the factors in choosing a different process management package. However, aside from familiarity and custom, there are other features of these packages, such as logging of stdout/stderr, that prove extremely useful in debugging services and will continue to induce their use. So we shouldn't assume that the user wants to use the process management tool that the package is shipped to use. > But as I said in my last comment, there is now an easy way to mark a > job as manual - and in the next release, this won't even require > editing the .conf file This isn't a whole lot better than simply commenting out the 'start on' line. There should be a way to cleanly do this programmatically. If you remove the upstart conf file, you lose the ability to test the service "out of the box," which is an important part of troubleshooting. Today, the Chef provider for upstart will try to manage the service starting on system startup by [un]commenting the 'start on' line in the .conf file. This is a bit hard to do with a guarantee, but okay. Programmatically editing config files is hard. Does the user manage this file, or dpkg, chef, or some combination? By default I am tempted to argue for a '.d' structure. There is some irony in this since upstart puts its configs in /etc/init and using /etc/init.d would overlap with sysvinit. I'd hate to see the custom hacking that we get with some sysvinit scripts where they source DAEMON_START="yes" in /etc/default/DAEMON. Something universal for upstart needs to exist. I've put off this email too long hoping I'd have more time to think about a solution than I have had. It must not require modifying the contents of a configuration file that other packages or the user owns. It should be simple, perhaps even simple enough that a user would use a tool to operate the mechanism, allowing other tools to be built on top as well. On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 11:32 AM, Scott James Remnant <94...@bugs.launchpad.net> wrote: > The "expected to uninstall" comes from Debian Policy, btw. It > probably shouldn't be a surprise that Debian still to this day doesn't > provide a canon way to disable init scripts from running on boot aside > from uninstalling the package. update-rc.d comes with the sysvinit package on Debian. It works pretty well, is accepted as the standard for package maintainer scripts and used by most configuration management systems. There are other tools, like sysv-rc-conf and bum, that are easy enough to install if you want a user friendly interface. What is essential about the existence of these tools is that there is a manageable way to control service startup and shutdown. The link based system was a little obtuse and required a bit of work to manage, but it has served us well. On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Scott James Remnant <94...@bugs.launchpad.net> wrote: > Sometimes people forget that normal users don't care one iota about > what a service is, let alone which are running on their machine http://www.ubuntu.com/server Perhaps normal users of the desktop edition don't, but I'd reckon most users of the server edition know what a service is, and care which are running on their machine. Please remember that we are legitimate users of Ubuntu, particularly when rewriting core system services. The lack of this feature becomes harder on us as more and more services are converted to use upstart out of the package. For instance, mysql-server uses upstart now. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/94065 Title: init: add non-destructive means to disable a job -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
