[InitKit] InitKit

[Richard Hughes]

On Tue, 2007-12-11 at 21:08 +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> Upstart suffered from a strange effect of open source; I sent out lots
> of early thoughts on the design, and didn't really get much buy-in
> because there wasn't any code.  But when I went away and wrote the code,
> now nobody was interested in it because there was "too much code!" --
> it's too difficult to swallow in one pill.

Agree. I went with completely open criticism along with blogging with
ideas for PackageKit, followed closely with a semi-working code drop.
It's a tricky one.

> That's where I hope you guys will come in, by getting different people
> from different groups involved early on.  Also checking my work and
> helping make some decisions :-)

Cool, thanks for the CC.

> First up: terminology.  What do we call what InitKit manages?
> 
> "service" is obvious, but has connotations of supervision; it also
> overlaps with "D-Bus Service Activation" which is likely to scare that
> group into believing we're trying to replace D-Bus instead of use it
> more.

Service is a good name, but as you say, overlaps with DBUS just too
closely.

> "task" has the opposite problem, it implies it's a one-off thing that
> doesn't stay around or get supervised.

Task to me is a single shot action.

> "job" is a bit simple, everything in UNIX ends up being a job.

Again, single shot.

> "script" implies it's written in shell, which daemons mostly aren't

Agree.

> "daemon" implies it forks into the background, which ideally they
> shouldn't

Sure.

> "process" says it's just one thing, but it might be several

Agree.

> I find some amusing words in a Thesaurus: "duty", "chore", "stint" :-)

Why not make one up? Seriously! What about ManagedService?

> bus name:   org.freedesktop.Init
> object:     /org/freedesktop/Init
> interface:  org.freedesktop.Init

Rock on with this IMO.

> What about the method form?
> 
> Start (String service_name)
> Stop (String service_name)
> 
> Or do we build for extension?
> 
> FindServiceByName (String name)
> 
> which returns an object that implements org.freedesktop.Service, which
> has the following methods:
> 
> Start ()
> Stop ()

Nahh, too much like DBUS. We'll know what to start and stop surely?

> Obviously in either case, the call should return when the service is
> running or stopped, or return an error.

Sure. I'm sure this open development will be good politically, even if
we end up using whole swathes of upstart code. :-)

Richard.