[Cialug] Ubuntu's New Init

[Daniel Juliano]

Just to add my 2c worth, I've been working with various workflow 
managers over the last five years, and the more I do so, the more I see 
everything as one big product of a workflow cycle.  One could literally 
describe everything that takes place inside a company - what people do, 
what they communicate to each other and how, when a computer steps in 
and performs some level of automation, etc - using one large UML 
diagram, and IBM certainly would be happy to sell you the tools to build 
just that (Rational tools, anyone?).

On point, where I'm currently at we've been using cron for a number of 
years to manage batch jobs, and I have been pointing out that it doesn't 
extend well once you get into a decent level of complexity, especially 
when it comes to troubleshooting dependencies.  For example:
  10:00pm job 1 fires
  11:00pm jobs 2 and 3 fire, are dependent on job 1
  12:00am job 4 fires, is dependent on job 1 and job 3
What happens to job 4 when job 3 doesn't fire?  Do you code a wait() 
loop into it?  Are you managing these dependencies from your code, 
meaning you have to update code every time you reshuffle jobs?

Ubuntu's 'Upstart' plays right into this, from what I've read, as it 
basically becomes one beautiful, integrated workflow engine.  If job 3 
doesn't fire, Upstart manages having 4 hold, and once 3 runs, 4 is 
automatically kicked off.  And this can be managed by an admin using 
either: a) command line tools that work similar to what you get with 
sysvinit, or b) some kind of GUI that makes the hierarchy a little more 
obvious.  If it truly works this way, this tool is soooo ridiculously 
valuable.

> IMHO, it still takes computers *way* to long to boot. I don't understand
> what's going on from a technical perspective, but embedded computers
> rarely take more than 2 seconds to boot. 
I mostly agree here.  I feisty + 1 will do a good job of knocking down 
the boot time, yet again.

Dan