Re: [gentoo-dev] init script guidelines

[Roy Marples]

On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 16:09 +0200, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> What I would really like to see in the init system is a way that
> initscripts can check whether the services they are responsible for are
> still running and then adjust their status accordingly, along with some
> nice output. This would then allow the execution of rc-status to give
> proper information of actually running daemons, and the "rc" command the
> possibility to actually bring online all daemons that should be running.
>
> Paul
>

Attached is a patch to baselayout-1.12.0_pre6-r3 that allows this.
Basically when an init script calls start-stop-daemon --start then we
log what it started (and hopefully a pidfile) in
${svcdir}/daemons/${myservice}

When it's status is asked for (either init.d/foo status or rc-status)
then we load this daemon file and check to see if the given daemons are
still running. If not then we call init.d/foo stop. We do this instead
of just marking the daemon as stopped in-case there is any clean-up code
that's needed to be run by the init script.

For this to work well, start-stop-daemon needs to be used correctly, not
just to stop it (like most init scripts seem to). sshd is a popular init
script and on most Gentoo'ers systems, so I've attached a patch so show
how init script should use start-stop-daemon so this works correctly.

What do people think about this? Is this worthfile and fixing all the
init scripts in the tree to use start-stop-daemon correctly AND for
starting up?

Thanks

Roy