[Soc-coordination] Report 5 - SysV-init file creator from systemd service files

[akhil vij]

Hi Everyone,

Please find my fifth report.

Regards,
Akhil Vij

Fifth Report
============

Project - Sys-V init file creator from systemd service files
============================================================

Status of the project so far :
=============================

After the mid-term evaluations, I have begun the testing and bug fixing
phase of my project as mentioned in my initial project proposal[0]. Last
week was devoted to testing, and parallely, I created a sound documentation
of the conversion logic (which I uploaded in the README section in my
repository [1]). I will keep updating this documentation as I add new
features and fix bugs.

Also, I included the support for handling specifiers as defined in the
Systemd.unit man page[2]. The converter supports %n/N, %p/P, %i/I and %f.
Currently, it doesn't understand the notion of escaped/unescaped names and
hence will simply use the extracted string in its original form. For
filenames of the form "@", if the instance name is not specified the script
will exit with a failure.

Right now, as far as the testing is concerned, I am running the generated
SysV init scripts (generated from F17 .service files) to ensure that the
start, stop, restart, force-reload and other actions are handled correctly.
I had a discussion with the mentors with regard to testing of the
converter. Some issues were found out which I am in the process of working
out. We are working towards a thorough testing plan. The main aim is to
make sure that currently available debian systemd unit files (there are
about 50 packages in Debian wheezy that ship .service files under
/lib/systemd/system) are correctly translated into working init scripts. We
decided that the next testing step should be to test these generated SysV
init scripts during boot and see that it starts correctly and gets ordered
in the same place in the boot sequence. Also once some small bugs/issues
are taken care of, I plan to announce a release on the debian developer
mailing list to gather developer's and user's feedback.

In the fourth report(the last one[3]), I mentioned about working on
packaging to make the converter script available in the Debian repo. But
after discussing with mentors, it was decided that testing is more
important job now and this can take the back seat for the time being. I am
also working on a proper logging infrastructure to warn users when they are
using systemd options that are incompatible with SysV. This should be done
in 2-3 days. So the main agenda for the coming days is to test properly and
fix bugs/improve features parallely.

As far as the overall pace of the project is concerned, I believe I am
running on time as per the initial project proposal[0]. The project can and
should be completed on time. The testing can and most probably will keep
going on after the GSOC period as more and more debian packages adopt to
systemd. I have no problems with this as would like to be a part of debian
community for a long time :) .


[0] : http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2012/StudentApplications/akhilvij
[1] : https://github.com/akhilvij/systemd-to-sysvinit-converter
[2] : http://0pointer.de/public/systemd-man/systemd.unit.html
[3] :
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/soc-coordination/2012-July/001304.html
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