Features/start-stop-daemon

= start-stop-daemon =

Summary
start-stop-daemon is an application that allows a sysadmin (or developer) to easily run a process as a daemon.

Owner

 * name: Jeremy Morton
 * email: jez9999@gmail.com

Current status

 * Targeted release: Fedora 12
 * Last updated: 2009-09-29
 * Percentage of completion: 0%

TODO: Port start-stop-daemon over from Debian.

Detailed Description
start-stop-daemon allows a system administrator or developer to easily start and stop a process as a daemon, if that process does not fork itself. Not all processes that one might wish would do this, do this. Therefore, the start-stop-daemon command which allows convenient management of daemon processes giving the ability to specify things like a PID file to be used to track the process's ID, and the ability to fork the process into the background for you, immediately returning control to the script. It is already distributed as standard in Debian/Ubuntu, who believe it appropriate to distribute such a tool as standard with their distributions.

Benefit to Fedora
Users/administrators/developers will more quickly and easily be able to write init.d scripts.

Scope
Existing functionality of start-stop-daemon on Debian must be ported over and tested.

How To Test
(to be decided)

User Experience
A much less complicated way for users/administrators/developers to write init.d scripts, and more consistent too - there would be this one single way to cleanly control a daemon process.

Dependencies
none

Contingency Plan
None necessary.

Documentation

 * Man page

Release Notes
(none)

Comments and Discussion
This would be a really useful tool, and in my opinion, one that every good OS should offer. Windows, through its service system, as well as obviously Debian and Ubuntu, and I'm sure MacOSX also, provide a clear documented way to start a process as a daemon via a piece of functionality that is distributed with the OS. I believe this results in a cleaner way of doing things, the more people you can get using the same functionality to control their daemon processes. At worst, it still makes it a lot easier to get some processes (which don't fork themselves) to behave as daemons. I don't think it would be too tough to port to Fedora; indeed I think there are some guides out there for doing just that. It just needs including in the distro.