[Fedora-packaging] LSB initscript ordering issues

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 10:48:04AM -0500, John Dennis wrote:
> On 12/03/2009 10:39 AM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> >John Dennis (jdennis at redhat.com) said:
> >>In the past we used hardcoded chkconfig start/stop numbers to
> >>control the order in which services were started and stopped. My
> >>understanding is that is deprecated (although still supported) but
> >>the preferred method is the LSB boot facility declarations
> >>(Required-Start, Should-Start, Required-Stop, Should-Stop). Correct?
> >
> >I wouldn't say it's *preferred*. It's an alternate method.
> >
> >>The section describing facility names seems a bit vague to me:
> >>
> >>Shouldn't the guidelines *require* that the LSB block have a
> >>Provides: declaration which at a minimum includes a name matching
> >>the initscript?
> >
> >That's implicitly provided no matter what.
> 
> It might be nice to update the wiki to make this clear.
> 
The Guidelines actually did require this. I've updated it to reflect that
the service name is implicitly noted.

> >
> >>In addition to the explicit eponymous Provides: what about virtual
> >>provides? Do we have a set of virtual provide names? (e.g.
> >>mailserver, webserver, or ldapserver)
> >
> >No. Those aren't defined in the spec.
> 
> Right, it's not an LSB issue but a Fedora packaging issue. Do we
> intend to define such a set of virtual provides for Fedora?
> 
This would make sense.  If you could propose a list to add that would be
great.  You might want to work with the virtual provides for services within
rpms, at least to use the same names, even if we don't end up using both.

> >
> >>The guidelines also state that an initiscript should never be marked
> >>as %config and instead import configuration settings from
> >>/etc/sysconfig/$name. But what about the case where a service may
> >>have a variety of boot dependencies depending on how it's
> >>configured? For example a service might be configured to optionally
> >>use mysql vs. postgres, or to use LDAP vs. SQL so it will have boot
> >>dependencies on particular services which cannot be hardwired ahead
> >>of time.
> >
> >The LSB spec won't help you here, alas.
> 
> Right, this isn't an LSB spec issue but a Fedora packaging guideline
> issue. If a sysadmin configures the service to depend on a specific
> set of dependency services then he/she will have to edit the
> initscript, thus it should be marked %config so that this
> customization is not lost.
> 
It could be that the LSB, dependency style is not flexible enough to work in
this instance.  We might be able to work around this with virtual provides,
though.  We do want to avoid marking init scripts as %config and eventually,
in the indefinite sense, we can use upstart's facilities to do this
sort of thing.  So I'm not certain that we'd want to start encouraging
people to mix config with the initscripts yet.

-Toshio
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