[Pkg-monitoring-maintainers] Bug#806785: ganglia-monitor: Impolite initscript interferes with other gmond services

[Brian Sutherland]

Package: ganglia-monitor
Version: 3.6.0-6
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

The current initscript has 2 undesireable behaviours:

 * It fails to start if there is another gmond service running
   (even though the other process uses a different configuration)
 * When it stops, it also kills other, unrelated gmond services.

My use case is that I am using multiple gmond processes on a "head" node
to collect statistics from a dynamic cluster. I am starting the other
gmond processes with a systemd unit file similar to:

	[Unit]
	Description=Other gmond

	[Service]
	Type=simple
	User=root
	PrivateTmp=true
	ProtectSystem=full
	ProtectHome=read-only
	NoNewPrivileges=true 
	PrivateDevices=true 
	ExecStart=/usr/sbin/gmond -f -c /usr/lib/mypkg/channel-1.conf

	[Install]
	WantedBy=multi-user.target

So far it's working great except for that impolite init script...

I can think of 3 possible solutions:

 * Add a systemd initscrit to ganglia-monitor
 * Split out the gmond binary into a separate package
   so it can be used separately
 * Fix the existing initscript to not arbitrarily kill other processes
   (possible?)

I am willing to work on the first option if it would be acceptable.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.2
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages ganglia-monitor depends on:
ii  adduser      3.113+nmu3
ii  libapr1      1.5.1-3
ii  libc6        2.19-18+deb8u1
ii  libconfuse0  2.7-5
ii  libexpat1    2.1.0-6+deb8u1
ii  libganglia1  3.6.0-6
ii  libpcre3     2:8.35-3.3
ii  zlib1g       1:1.2.8.dfsg-2+b1

ganglia-monitor recommends no packages.

ganglia-monitor suggests no packages.

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/ganglia/gmond.conf changed [not included]
/etc/init.d/ganglia-monitor changed [not included]

-- no debconf information