Hi Scott, hi Ubuntu developers, here at the DebConf 7 in Edinburgh we came up with a somewhat neat idea: Observing that a lot of packages ship init scripts, and noting that most of these scripts are both not very well cared for (just copy’n’pasted and slightly adjusted) and also very similar, we thought that this can be done better.
This lead to the idea of metainit which compromises of: * A small declarative file format to describe the daemon, to be shipped by the package (or created by a local admin) * A meatinit package that creates init scripts (or, yet to be written, upstart jobs) from these files * A dh_metainit scripts to ease the inclusion of metainit files in your package, that adds appropriate maintainer script snippets. In a way, metainit is a mixture of the menu system and cdbs, for init scripts. The advantages of this system are - For the package maintainer: No need to manually create and maintain init scripts or upstart jobs - For the distrubtion in general: More consistent init scripts in the distribution Easier to add new features (e.g. lsb output) - For the ubuntu/debian relationship: The same package could be used unmodified in Debian (creating sysvinit scripts) and ubuntu (upstart jobs) - For ubuntu: It could help to ease the transition to a pure upstart based system. - For the user: Can create “good” init scripts for custom daemons with just one line in one file and one command (update-metainit) What this system is not meant for: Replacing all init script in packages. We (at least currently) will only support “simple” daemons (no very special dependencies, no strange ways of starting or stopping them, no forking mode supported, forking is done by the init script or upstart). We do hope to make metainit work for the “boring” 80%-90% of init scripts. All other packages are welcome to continue doing what they did before. I’d like to advocate this approach in ubuntu as well as in debian, to keep them as compatible as possible, and hopefully to get some more support when developing and spreading meatinit. I do not have the time to do maintain the ubuntu specific parts of metainit itself and would rather focus on the debian side. It would be great if someone would pick up the ubuntu part, write a spec and work with me to make metainit useful to ubuntu as well. Thanks, Joachim Links: Wiki page (still reflecting the brainstorming phase): http://wiki.debian.org/MetaInit You can find binaries and the source on: http://people.debian.org/~nomeata/metainit You can browse the source or do a darcs get on: http://darcs.nomeata.de/metainit/ http://darcs.nomeata.de/cgi-bin/darcsweb.cgi?r=metainit A description of the metainit file format (as perldoc): http://darcs.nomeata.de/cgi-bin/darcsweb.cgi?r=metainit;a=headblob;f=/lib/MetaInit/Parse.pm Example metainit files: http://darcs.nomeata.de/metainit/examples/ A descriptions of the steps to upgrade a package to metainit: http://darcs.nomeata.de/metainit/doc/converting.txt A debian directory of a simple daemon (without debhelper): http://infon.dividuum.de/trac/browser/trunk/contrib/debian?rev=208 A debian directory of a simple daemon (with debhelper): http://infon.dividuum.de/trac/browser/trunk/contrib/debian?rev=210 (the debian/infon-server.init file is not used anymore) -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C JID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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