Bug#786443: inhibit while a PID is running

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org> [2016-01-30 05:54 +1300]:
> Can you be more specific how you envision this to work? Afaics
> this is inherently racy, so I'm not sure if it's a good idea to
> provide such an interface.

Is it racy? Wouldn't it be as simple as monitoring the inode of
/proc/$pid and if the directory disappears or changes inode, then
the PID has terminated? Surely, this can also be done without
procfs…

> Why don't you just run your backup via systemd-inhibit
> <my-backup-script>? I assume you trigger this via cron or
> a similar mechanism, so adding systemd-inhibit to start the
> command seems like the correct way.

To do this, I'd have to tell my backup server about all the machines
that use systemd, i.e. another place to track this information that
is inherently implicit in the systems.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at d.o> @martinkrafft
: :'  :  proud Debian developer
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
 
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 with tangerine trees and marmelade skies..."
                                                      -- the beatles
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