08.11
Recently I’ve been fiddling a bit with Upstart, and in general I’m positive about the experience. Upstart offers a lot of flexibility and simple but very welcome features like real service supervision with respawning capabilities. There are a few downsides:
Relatively few SysV init scripts have been converted to Upstart jobs. This is logical since there are a lot of scripts to convert and all of them need testing before considering them production ready. That said, the progress over time in this area isn’t particularly overwhelming either.
Upstart is much harder to troubleshoot when unexpected things happen, this is to a degree inherent to Upstart’s parallel/event-based nature. Adding the following options to your kernel parameters does help a bit: ‘nosplash INIT_VERBOSE=yes init=/sbin/init noplymouth -v’.
As far as I know there is no way to have SysV init scripts depend on Upstart jobs. While this was to be expected since this is pretty hard to implement sensibly. But considering my first point (the fact that lots of SysV scripts still have be converted), this can be annoying. My advice, don’t fiddle with the the rc job! I did, and it gave me grief (Upstart hung on reboots), causing me to waste a day figuring out what went wrong. If you need a SysV script to depend on an Upstart job, remove the SysV script and convert it to an Upstart job yourself.
