Dependencies

[Scott James Remnant]

One of the perils of the "Release Early, Release Often"[0] approach is
that you'll have people come to you expecting the Moon on a Stick, when
you're still in the process of figuring out how to get there.

We wanted to release this early, because we want other distributions and
members of the community to have a chance to have a big say in the
design of it.

As it exists at the moment, the core bones of the code and functionality
is there; services can be started, stopped and respawned based on very
simple events.

The more complex cases of events with arguments and environment,
collections of events, waiting for multiple events, etc. are still on
the drawing board.

They'll certainly be in place for 1.0, but not yet.

You seem to have some pretty good ideas about how you want things to
work, please elaborate on them -- the most important part of design is
having good use cases to start with.

Jerry's already pointed out our thoughts on improving events beyond just
a simple string, and improving the job state machine to fulfil some more
use cases.  He's been extraordinarly helpful in these ideas, and is just
a community member like yourself.

So for the design questions in your e-mail, I'll leave it to you to
answer how you'd *like* that to work -- which we can incorporate into
the design of how it will work.

> Finally, I'd like to voice a couple of opinions that I'll only comment on 
> once; I won't debate them, I just want to record them.
> 
> 1) Any listserve that doesn't support searching sucks.  Hard.  If a question 
> is a FAQ and is answered somewhere in such a listserver, then tough luck.  It 
> is not justifiable to point people at the list archives for answers, which 
> renders the listserve practically useless.  I'd recommend moving this list to 
> a non-crappy listserve.
>  
mailman/pipermail seems about the most common list manager in use, it
seems to work well enough for everyone else.   What would you recommend
instead?

Searching is easy:  http://www.google.com/ with
"site:lists.netsplit.com" as the first keyword.  I don't think I've ever
used a list server's own search interface.

The list is also indexed/searched by gmane:
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.upstart.devel

Both these people do a far better job than any search box that I know
of.

I appreciate your comments though, I'll have a look through the
pipermail code and see if it's possible to add a search box to the page
that directs people to Google site search.

> 2) If there's a FAQ, it would be a good idea to link to it, prominently, from 
> the main Upstart page.  If there isn't, then I won't complain; I know the 
> project is young yet.
> 
There is no FAQ.

> 3) The "getting started" tutorial is good, but utterly impractical for 
> anything other sysinit-based systems.  I'd really like to see even a sparse, 
> rough draft, but formalized syntax for the scripts, and/or some examples of 
> non-trivial scripts.  For example, describing how to handle multiple event 
> dependencies :-)  Since the examples provided offload all of the 
> inter-service dependency handling to sysinit, they aren't very useful. 
> 
There is no formalised syntax yet, it's still a rough work in process.
There's no way to handle multiple event dependencies yet, what syntax do
you think would work best for this?

The reason most things are about sysvinit handling is simply that that's
been the first priority; being backwards compatible is a *big* important
first step, and helps us test the ideas without losing the ability to
revert to sysvinit in case it all goes wrong.

The next step is the one you're taking :)  Please don't stop taking it,
your help will be invaluable in getting this right.

Scott

[0] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html
-- 
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen?  Are you going round the twist?
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