[gentoo-dev] init scripts and custom signals

[Roy Marples]

Hi

It's been brought to my attention that dnsmasq and acpid use start-stop-daemon 
to send custom signals such as HUP. While this works with baselayout-1.11, it 
does not work with baselayout-1.12

The start-stop-daemon-binary has to have either a --start or --stop option. 
Now I read this as two simple statements.
1) I want to start daemon foo
2) I want to stop daemon foo

The aforementioned init scripts want option 3
3) I want to stop daemon foo with signal HUP
Which is perfectly valid. However, HUP is not a stop signal and they expect it 
to process the signal and not stop.

baelayout-1.12 is a bit more strict about things. If you ask something to 
--stop it stops regardless.

So, the question now must be, do we allow start-stop-daemon to defy calling 
logic and NOT stop a daemon? How do we know we're not supposed to stop the 
daemon based on a custom signal? The answer is we can't. So instead of

start-stop-daemon --stop -s HUP -p /var/run/dnsmasq.pid

we need to write

kill -s HUP $(< /var/run/dnsmasq.pid)

Thanks

-- 
Roy Marples <uberlord@g.o>
Gentoo Linux Developer
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