[Nix-dev] Upstart 0.6

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

I created a NixOS branch for switching to Upstart 0.6 recently, which seems to
work fairly well now.  It's certainly a big improvement over Upstart 0.3.  Most
importantly, you can now write a job such that when it emits its "started"
event, it's actually ready (e.g. to accept connections).  Previously we had all
kinds of race conditions involving job dependencies.

I'd like to merge the branch into the trunk soon.  If you want to try it out, do
the following:

$ cd /etc/nixos/nixos
$ svn switch ^/nixos/branches/upstart-0.6
$ nixos-rebuild boot

After this you should reboot, because the new Upstart isn't compatible with the
old one.

There is one issue with Upstart 0.6: the stdout/stderr of jobs no longer goes to
/var/log/boot, but to the console.  This isn't very elegant, but I don't see an
easy solution.  (I guess we can stick an "exec > /var/log/boot 2>&1" in the
pre-start script, but you wouldn't get timestamps in the log.)

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/