Hi Peter,

Le Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 02:40:28PM +0200, Peter T. Breuer a écrit :

Could you please add some basic introductory explanations to the man
pages (or e'en readme) for update-service and friends (svscan, svc, svscanboot)?

<snip>

Thanks for your bugreport; after 17 years it's still useful :)

I guess information about what the package does and why one would want to install it primary belongs in the packages' (extended) description: that's where users likely encounter it first.

We currently have:

Package: daemontools-run
Version: 1:0.76-14
Description: daemontools service supervision
Starts svscanboot from inittab, and provides the directory /etc/service/
for services to be supervised by daemontools.

Package: daemontools
Version: 1:0.76-14
Description: collection of tools for managing UNIX services
supervise monitors a service. It starts the service and restarts the
service if it dies. Setting up a new service is easy: all supervise
needs is a directory with a run script that runs the service.
.
multilog saves error messages to one or more logs. It optionally timestamps
each line and, for each log, includes or excludes lines matching specified
patterns. It automatically rotates logs to limit the amount of disk space
used. If the disk fills up, it pauses and tries again, without losing any
data.

I guess it at least should mention the fact that systemd and SysV init
(and runit) offer comparable functionality.

We could use the runit descriptions for inspiration:

Package: runit
Version: 2.2.0-3
Description: system-wide service supervision
runit is a collection of tools to provide system-wide service supervision
and to manage services. Contrary to sysv init, it not only cares about
starting and stopping services, but also supervises the service daemons
while they are running. Amongst other things, it provides a reliable
interface to send signals to service daemons without the need for pid-files,
and a log facility with automatic log file rotation and disk space limits.
.
runit service supervision can run under sysv init, systemd or replace the init
system completely. Complete init replacement is provided by 'runit-init'
package. Users that want to take advantage of runit supervision under systemd
or sysv init can directly install the 'runit-run' package.


Package: runit-run
Description: service supervision (systemd and sysv integration)
[...]
This package provides service file to start runit supervision via systemd
and an entry in /etc/inittab that respawns the supervision tree for sysv
users.


Package: runit-init
Description: system-wide service supervision (as init system)
[...]
.
This package provides /sbin/init as a symlink to runit-init so that the system
will automatically boot with runit; it also provides compatibility symlinks
(shutdown, halt, reboot, poweroff) that are expected by desktop environments
and other system tools.
To install this package the user need to first remove the `init' metapackage,
for more details see #1005881 or visit
https://salsa.debian.org/runit-team/runit-wiki/-/wikis/home


I *might* have time to come up with some text improvements soonish.

Bye,

Joost

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