[Soc-coordination] Weekly report (11th week) - Debian GNU/Hurd Debianish initialization

[heroxbd at gentoo.org]

Hey 4winter,

4winter at informatik.uni-hamburg.de writes:

> With the `ifupdown` fixes that I published last week I actually
> reached my initial goal, that is to make Debian/Hurd boot using
> `sysvinit` and the `initscripts` provided by Debian. 

Excellent work! Is there a test box or repo somewhere I could try out?

> So on Monday we were discussing in #hurd what I could do next. Michael
> Banck suggested that I should port Upstart, but we agreed to do
> something different instead for two reasons:
>
> 1. Upstart and systemd are somewhat competing to be the default init
>    system for Debian, and we felt it might be inappropriate to get
>    involved with this question as porting Upstart to Hurd would
>    probably also enable it to be used on FreeBSD. The Upstart folks
>    could then point out that Upstart is more portable because it runs
>    on all kernels used by Debian.
>
> 2. Upstart uses ptrace(2) to track child processes of servers it
>    monitors. Obviously this is kind of a hack, and it was conjectured
>    that Upstart would eventually use cgroups to do that. Also, the
>    Hurd lacks support for ptrace(2) (that is most likely by choice by
>    the way, ptrace(2) is not a nice interface and the Hurd (Mach
>    actually) has much nicer interfaces to implement a debugger).

As I mentioned in the beginning of SOC, porting OpenRC to Hurd would be
easy as the codebase is very light and no Linux-specific feature
required. And now it reached a compatibility level that could drop-in
replace sysv-rc, thanks to Bill Wang.

So I'd like to hear your and the hurd team's opinion towards OpenRC.

> So we decided that no matter how the struggle between Upstart and
> systemd turns out, the Hurd would eventually need to support
> cgroups. 

Very reasonable decision. It will benefit us all.

[...]

Cheers,
Benda