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Showing posts from October, 2012

Hacking Upstart Together

If you missed the Hacking Upstart Together session at UDS-R in Copenhagen, here are the slides: http://people.canonical.com/~jhunt/presentations/uds-r/2012-10-31/upstart-development.pdf This gives a very gentle introduction to Upstart development and covers NIH, common gotchas and more. ... and if you'd like the LaTeX source.... http://people.canonical.com/~jhunt/presentations/uds-r/2012-10-31   We are always looking for new contributors and have some very interesting work lined up this cycle. So, if you're interested in contributing even a small patch or feature, please feel free to contact me or ask on the mailing list .

Procenv and the Process Environment

Quiz How many attributes of a processes "environment" can you think of besides its environment variables? I'm using the term "environment" in a very loose sense here to mean "any system or process level attribute that can be queried via system calls or library calls (or " /proc -picking ") that affects a running process". I'm also including details of the process itself and details of the program that came to be a running process. We're not talking about installed packages or application configuration files in /etc here, but purely low-level program, process and system meta-data. I've got over 20 items in my list excluding environment variables. Whilst you're pondering on that... Compare and Contrast If you've been involved with computers for any appreciable length of time, chances are you have come across the scenario where some program fails to run in a particular environment, but works "perfectly&q

out is out, utfout is out!

My output utility (originally called ' out ' - see previous post ) is now available in debian sid as ' utfout ': http://packages.debian.org/sid/utfout

Call for Testing: New "stateful re-exec" build of Upstart

It didn't quite make quantal, but if you'd like to help test Upstart " stateful re-exec " support, there's a new build (Upstart version 1.5-0ubuntu10~jh20121015 ) in my PPA: https://launchpad.net/~jamesodhunt/+archive/upstart-testing/ We have so far added 60 new tests specifically for stateful re-exec support. The plan is to add this new feature to Ubuntu early in the "R" cycle, so please give it a test by installing the new test version (on a non-critical system! ;-) and running " sudo telinit u " to force Upstart to restart.