Re: Adding a 'setup' phase to service startup?

[Lars Kellogg-Stedman <lars@oddbit.com>]

> Although I think runit itself should remain pristine in that it only
> runs the ./run script for a service...

And the finish script.  And the log/run script.  And the various control/*
scripts.  My point being, adding a setup phase to the service doesn't
represent much of a change, especially since it has zero impact on the
system's behavior if there is no setup script in place.

Adding an entire new layer on to handle dependencies would seem to detract
from the inherent simplicity of the system -- one should be able to use
runsv, by itself, to start up a service and have behave it exactly like it
would when run "in production".  This means that new logic for things like
dependency resolution (or respawn limiting) needs to be either (a)
implemented in runsv, or (b) implemented as external commands that can be
executed by the 'run' script.

Implementing service dependencies in the run script is already difficult,
particularly because the runit tools are unable to differentiate between
"starting up" and "up".  This is the small, reasonably well bounded problem
that I'm hoping to solve.

-- Lars

-- 
Lars Kellogg-Stedman <lars@oddbit.com>