Re: [gentoo-dev] New USE flag 'daemontools' as an alternative to init.d

["Hallgrimur H. Gunnarsson" <hhg@data.is>]

On 11.09.2003 Wes Chow <wes@woahnelly.net> wrote:
> 
> I always thought daemontools sounded nice, but have never tried to
> actually use it for system services.  Actually, there is one thing that
> I'm not quite sure how it deals with, which is dependencies.  For
> example, under the Gentoo init scripts, you can specify that, the
> "httpd" service only gets started after the "net" service is up and
> running.  Looking over daemontools, I wasn't able to find any obvious
> way of doing this.  Is there?

No, that'd be implemented in another layer above daemontools itself
(provided that you'd even want to do that with daemontools).
Daemontools is not meant to replace init.d in network initialization,
which isn't a daemon, so you couldn't supervise
it with daemontools. Daemontools is for managing daemons,
starting, stopping, restarting, status, signal delivery. Daemontools
ensures that a daemon will be running, init.d doesnt notice or restart
a service if it suddenly dies, init.d also doesnt offer logging
in the way daemontools can provide it.

Daemontools is already being used by at least qmail and djbdns by
default. By introducing a USE flag we get many advantages:

*) Packages can provide daemontools and init.d support. The user
can choose what to use for managing a service.

*) Packages using daemontools as default now, can provide init.d
support if 'daemontools' is not set.

etc.

I'd also like to point out two additional packages in portage
that might be of use if you're using or planning on checking
out daemontools.

daemontools-man: provides man pages for daemontools.
supervise-scripts: simplified wrappers for managing services in
daemontools.

You can also read up on bug #28294, where alot of discussion
has been going on.

Martin Schlemmer (azarah) has given a green light on this, so
I'll be submitting daemontools-aware modification for ebuilds
during the next days.

-- hhg

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