[clue-tech] upstart

[Nate Duehr]

dennisjperkins at comcast.net wrote:

> I doubt that the 6 run levels used by sysvinit are necessary.  Almost everyone either runs in single or multiuser mode.  I read somewhere that the 6 levels (actually there are more but are not used) are modelled after some switching device that ATT or some company had, and someone thought it was a good idea to copy it.

I can guarantee it.  Debian's really only used two run levels since -- 
oh, forever.  I doubt they'll be picking up this RH wackiness as their 
new "standard" either.

BSD servers seem to get along just fine with a single start script 
managing everything too, for the ultra-purists in the crowd.

This new startup stuff is nothing more than "vendor lock in" to RedHat, 
if you ask me.

(Uh oh, did I fan that fire?  Yep.  I went there.  RH wants to lock you 
in just like MS did in the 80s.  Naughty naughty RH.  Well, naughty if 
you didn't see it coming... and are somehow upset that they need a way 
to differentiate themselves from the Linux crowd.  Duh.)

> Upstart can also handle the addition and removal of USB devices.  This is being done by udev or HAL in most systems but an upstart job can do it instead.  DeviceKit is apparently going to replace HAL at some point, but that is the extent of my knowledge about DeviceKit right now.

And those were broken, how that we need the system startup software to 
handle USB devices for us?  (sigh...)

> Abandoning run levels runs counter to LSB.  I don't know if the big distros are 100% compliant, but some distros ignore it because they feel some of LSB is wrong.

LSB isn't "wrong" per-se, but there's almost zero economic advantage to 
a distro following it.  Pisses off the software vendors and really big 
ISV's to no end that no one does, though... they see Linux as a bunch of 
disorganized crap.  (And only time will tell if they're right, but 
meanwhile they don't release Linux software packages.)

> The development of upstart started in Aug 2006.  It reached 0.5.0 this summer.  The development plan seems to be small, incremental steps.  Build the basic parts first.  Run it.  Refine it.  Redo parts that don't work as expected.  Kernel development is the same way.  Look at how many schedulers the kernel has discarded.

So you're saying "when you're lost in the woods, make small changes in 
course and direction?"  I thought the rule was "hug a tree".  :-)

> One goal is to add time-based events.  This means cron capability is planned at some point in the future.  Replacing D-Bus, acpid, etc, are not planned.  They handle different tasks.

Damn, maybe the thing can replace emacs and be a complete OS someday. 
LOL.  Isn't all this cramming all of this stuff into one application 
contrary to the Unix philosophy of "small and good" and stacking those 
applications to get something accomplished?

(Or is the world now saying that they want one big monolithic "managers" 
of the whole OS?  Isn't that the Windows OS model?  Methinks -- RedHat 
doesn't have a freakin' clue what they're doing, but they'd die before 
just stopping DOING stuff, just to change things and be annoying.  Of 
course, they might ... since they gotta get paid for adding SOMETHING to 
Linux, I suppose...)

> Upstart can track daemons.  Sysvinit cannot.  If a daemon crashes, upstart can try to restart it automatically.  The number of restarts can be limited.

Gosh, we've handled this by launching a process from startup that acts 
as a parent to children for decades.  Even one of the commercial 
products I work on does this, and really doesn't need a "manager" 
handling it, other than the 20 line shell script some engineer wrote to 
do it years ago...

> There are probably other things that could be mentioned, but I think this is enough for now.

So far, they're all not very compelling reasons to swap out SysV and 
switch to this thing, really.

> As far as higher priority things needed to be addressed first, there are plenty of hackers out there.  Upstart is not distracting the kernel hackers, the KDE hackers, or the GNOME hackers.  Upstart and its competitors are the result of an itch by distro developers for a problem they appear to have with hot-pluggable devices and dependencies between some programs.

Ahh yes, the broken but often flouted "many hands makes light work" 
model... except that it leaves out who's DIRECTING the many hands...

Oh well ... something (unnecessary -- again) to learn to support the 
darling little "Corporate" Linux distro that loves changing things for 
no good reason, I guess.  Wasting my time here, RedHat... but thanks to 
the list, I at least know it's coming my way...

Nate