[gentoo-soc] Upstart Proposal

[Oliver Schinagl]

Hello all,

According to http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/userrel/soc/applying.xml one
should write a proposal and such as here it is!

I'm not quite sure on the structure of this proposal, it is said in the
link above that certain points needed to be brought up in such proposal.
So here goes...

I was browsing through various available projects on the Gentoo SoC
project page and upstart jumped right out to me. For a while I've been
saddened to see quick startup times on new distro's such like Ubuntu
where my Desktop, which was much faster, took it's merry time. It was
mostly noticeable on my media box. I tried init-ng ages ago and was
quite impressed. However init-ng had two downsides. 1) init-ng didn't
quite work with the current init scripts, but more importantly 2)
init-ng was not very well supported. Not by gentoo or any distro really
and it lacked developers.

Upstart has a solid developer base, and is used by atleast one major
distro, Ubuntu. Having support in upstart for Gentoo, albeit via a
patch, would mean Gentoo would benefit from all upstart advances whilst
still keeping the usual init.d scripts.

This project would consists of a patch to upstart/libnih to support
booting a gentoo box using the gentoo init.d scripts.

Figuring out a projects timeline, with little information sounds easier
then done. Using googles timeline for GSoC it would look something like
the following.

April 27th:
Start of digging into upstart documentation. Figure out how upstart
works and if needed write some documentation.
+2 weeks:
The second half of the documentation reading phase should consist on
figuring out what needs to be done, and more importantly what would be
missing in the current init.d scripts.
May 24th:
Get a development enviroment working which would be a basic stage3
gentoo install and tie in upstart. See where things go wrong. Upstart
wouldn't need to start anything yet, just get it working and doing
something. Examine written documentation and see if it is accurate at
all. Adjust where needed.
+3 weeks:
Start to get the most basic of gentoo init.d scripts to work with upstart.
+3 weeks:
Gentoo should now boot using upstart and do the most basic tasks. There
will most very likely no dependency checking etc. Just get services running.
July 12th:
First deliverable, Working upstart for most basic services.
+3 weeks:
Dependencies and other issues should be addressed and documented. Think
of ways how to solve issues that have arisen.
+3 weeks:
Dependencies and everything else should be working. Upstart should now
be pretty much working with nearly all options.
August 9th:
Second deliverable, Working upstart for all services. Inc. documentation
of changes.
August 15th:
Final deliverable, Working upstart, containing all fixes and suggested
final changes. Code should be beautiful now and eligible for upstream
inclusion.

Required with the proposal is some information about me. I already
mentioned a few things in my Hello post, but I'll go slightly deeper here.

My name is Oliver Schinagl and I am studying at the Technical University
of Eindhoven to gain my Masters degree in Computer Science and
Engineering. I have been a computer fanatic since the early days and I
started on a C64. I was probably to young back then and even more
probably not interested enough but did play around with some basic
stuff. Poke and pike where fun but for a 10 year old far to complex to
grasp.
After our C64 we got our first (hand me down) XT, as my mother needed it
for her hobby. No, not a computer geek, but she needed to write
documents for the local radio station and enter data into some dbm. This
is where I first got to mess with DOS, play with the 'menu' application
to set it up and get to work in Word Perfect 5.1. The XT was luckily
quickly replaced by a hand me down 286. I don't remember much of it,
just that it had a 40mb harddisk that I broke :) Doublespace and fdisk,
what? heh :) This is when I first bought my first Creative 16bit card,
my own first piece of hardware!

Linux did exist back then, but I had never heard of it, a shame really.
It took me until I bought my first own PC, that I heard about this linux
thing that runs on servers and is the best solution to NAT.
When we got our first cable connection, I took our old penitum and after
a few months of buggy crashy win95 with wingate I installed this really
awesome thing I heard about called slackware. I had tried Redhat 4.2 for
a bit a few months before but without a net connection and just a cli I
felt a little lost. Doing my research on how this linux and slackware
thing worked I had quickly setup my first server to do iprouting and
found myself as months passed I spent more and more time tinkering and
using my linux server more then my Desktop, which had become nothing
more then a music player.

A few years had passed and it was not until 2004 that I ran into Gentoo
Linux. I belive 2004.1 was just released and was eager to burn the iso.
It had everything I could ever dream of, packages built to MY
specifications, I decided which feature I wanted using uselfags, and I
could keep updating packages without having to re-install a new version
all the time. I fell in love.

As the years passed I kept upgradeing my hardware but kept the same
gentoo install. I still have my first 32bit install I think! Al my
machines now run gentoo, except my laptop. That one runs Ubuntu. My
laptop is used for work, school and other things and the pain involved
sometimes with gentoo can be to inconvenient and time consuming. My
other machines will remain to be Gentoo!

So when asked what do I do in my spare time? Well ... work on my systems
of course! Although I have to admit, for the past year I have been very
happily in a relation and this put my time with my systems on a lower level.

To fund my education I have a job, which sometimes lets me do fun stuff
with computers. Unfortunately at the moment it is only web programming,
but even that I enjoy, for now. I have had a past internship for Philips
TASS, now just TASS, where I co-developed a graphical equalizer. The
interesting part of this project was however that it was written in
handel-C, a derivative of C, suitable with FPGA's. I fondly still think
back of my internship there.
Other then gentoo, I recently started to look at GeeXbox and more
specifically the Enna mediacenter. I am actually working on a little
patch to give enna support for the wiimote controller!
Programming I enjoy. And if it is up to me, I write in C following K&C
closely.
Maybe out of the blue, my first opensource code contribution was
probably a silly attempt into writing a tvout tool for my 3dfx VooDoo3.
Googling for 3dfx tvout still finds it :)

To keep this message from growing much longer, I better stop myself and
just say, I would love to work on this assignment and if any questions
arise, I'd be more then happy to answer!

Thanks for reading,
Oliver