Comment 20 for bug 60429

On Mon, 2010-04-12 at 13:52 +0000, Simon Oosthoek wrote:

> I'd like to see this bug re-opened, because there's still not sufficient
> documentation and some aspects of upstart indicate that it may be
> immature for a LTS release (IMHO).
>
If there are key areas of missing documentation that should be included
in the tarball, please open new bugs for each individual case - don't
just reopen this one.

New bugs are key here, because that will allow the tasks to be assigned
to different people who are good at that documentation.

This bug refers to the complete lack of *any* documentation - which is
clearly no longer true, there are detailed manual pages, README, etc.
now.

So I've marked this back as "Fix Released" - but please don't let that
deter you for opening new bugs for the specific missing documentation as
noted above <g>

> Some items I'd like to see addressed:
> - a graphing tool to help debug upstart events/jobs
> (a tool to process all related files, turning out a dot file so graphviz can make a pretty graph would be great)
>
This is covered by bug #203417

> - a tool showing (a graph of) the sequence of events and jobs perfomed by upstart until that moment since startup
>
This is partially covered by bug #388746, it's also worth noting that a
big planned feature for the next version is to maintain a journal of
Upstart's activities for debugging purposes - which would also be ideal
for this kind of graph!

> - better documentation, in the form of a complete discussion/tutorial of the (ideal) upstart system
>
Can't agree more; please open a bug for that - if you know of anyone who
can write something like that, it'd be appreciated. This is fairly
difficult to put into the traditional "man" format, and "info" doesn't
really seem appropriate either.

Perhaps a PDF or similar?

> - an upstart tutorial for sysadmins who are used to sysV init scripts
>
Likewise, a bug opened for this would be most welcome - and somebody to
write it. Suspect it has the same format possibilities as the one
above.

> One of the things that caused me to doubt the readiness for LTS is the lines in mountall(8):
> This is a temporary tool...
> ...you should not rely on its behaviour.
>
You misunderstand the meaning of LTS. LTS means we'll provide long-term
support for it - mountall can be supported in its current state.
However it's behaviour may change in maverick, and it'll vanish at some
point in the future.

Unfortunately in the case of the boot, we're making major changes every
six months as this is an area under rapid development and improvement.
Our only two options would be never to release any of our work (in which
case, we'd get no testing and not find the issues we've found) - or to
never release an LTS until it's finished.

We don't have two branches of Ubuntu.

> Another is the strange mixing of SysV initscripts with upstart jobs,
> it's seriously confusing! Lack of proper documentation in this situation
> doesn't help.
>
This is always going to be a feature of Upstart, since the LSB still
mandates init scripts for LSB compliant software. Until LSB is changed
to mandate Upstart jobs, and until the previous versions of LSB have
been obsoleted, this is something that will always be supported.

> I notice quite a few unanswered upstart discussions on the forum:
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1438501
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1349053
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1348131
>
> are there so few people who can easily answer such queries?
>
In general, developers don't tend to read the Ubuntu Forums - there's
too much traffic here to realistically follow, and developers just don't
have that much time!

It's more of a fellow-user-support area.

> If I were to run into trouble with upstart, where should I turn for
> help? it seems Canonical is one of the few places one can turn to for
> help, is this open source vendor lock-in?
>
It's hardly vendor lock-in, it's just a piece of software still in
development that few people know really well yet. Upstart is a
completely open project, with participation from members of all of the
major distributions.

You could point at the fact that support with udisks and upower is only
available from Red Hat too, for example!

I guess you can ask me for support, but I don't really scale and I'd
much rather spend my time *fixing* the issues with Upstart than
explaining how to work around them to each and every person.

I'd much prefer it if I could brain dump at someone so *they* could then
support people ;-) want to volunteer?

Scott
--
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?