Expand manual:yes to work for run/task and sysv as well as service

[hongkongkiwi]

manual:yes seems to be not supported for task definitions (?)

task [S123456789] manual:yes name:test /tmp/test > /tmp/test2 -- test

This appears to execute immediately even though I'm asking it to be manual.

[troglobit]

Hmm, yeah that doesn't sound right. I'll look into it!

[troglobit]

Turns out manual:yes was limited to type service when it was introduced in 2018, 6a7f1157. I should have been more careful when documenting it.

I'm adding this to the v4.4 release cycle, opening it up for run/task and sysv types as well.

[hongkongkiwi]

Very helpful, how does manual:yes work when used together with conditions?

[troglobit]

A service with manual:yes will remain in halted state until it's "unblocked" by the user calling initctl start foo. This allows the service to transition to ready, optionally going to setup first if pre: is defined. When in ready the aggregation of all conditions are evaluated, if a condition is not asserted the service remains in ready, otherwise it will be allowed to be started.

One possibility I see here is to discuss the semantics for manual:yes on both run and task, which by definition only run once per runlevel (or as we found out, after an initctl reload foo :)

Alternatives I see:

1. Behave as before, manual only means it's up to the user to start them
2. A manual run/task is allowed to run more than once per runlevel, at the discretion of the user

I think alternative 2 is very appealing.

[hongkongkiwi]

I like (2) as it fits my use case. But could I suggest a slight modification because I think having behaviour only for manual:yes could be confusing.

What about this....

• manual:yes just makes the task not start automatically
• initctl start <task> same behaviour as before
• a new flag is added: initctl start -f <task> which forces the task to run again even if it's run before (assuming other conditions match)

This way the behaviour is very clear and it doesn't break any backwards compatibility. The user can repeatedly run initctl start <task> as they see fit and they will only ever get a single run (in the runlevel) as they might expect.

HOWEVER if the user knows that they absolutely want to run the task again (which is my use case) then they can use initctl start -f <task> and know that the task will be immediately run (if it's not already running and conditions are matched).

In future, it might be nice to have another flag to ignore conditions as well, say -ff but that might get complicated now I guess.

[troglobit]

I dunno, since manual:yes has been reserved only for service stanzas before, I'd say we can set the scene as we like. Also, we don't support option flags on sub-commands to initctl, much like ip/bridge commands in iproute2, and that would be quite a bit of work to implement for this single feature. That's not the argument though ...

... I argue that since run/task are by their very nature different from service, we can define what manual:yes means for them. I posit that manual:yes means "leave behavior up to user". We should of course also allow manual status to be shown by initctl, e.g.: "manual: managed by user" vs "manual: managed by finit", or similar.

[hongkongkiwi]

Just realised -f is used for something, perhaps we could use something else even a whole new command.

initctl force-start <name>

[hongkongkiwi]

I see, so if you want a task to be able to be run multiple times AND automatically you would have two task definitions, one manual and one automatic. The automatic one will only ever run once (or with a specific service reload) and the manual task will always run when requested?

[troglobit]

I see, so if you want a task to be able to be run multiple times AND automatically you would have two task definitions, one manual and one automatic. The automatic one will only ever run once (or with a specific service reload) and the manual task will always run when requested?

Yes, that's the way I see it.

[hongkongkiwi]

Thank you for completing this, very useful for me.

Wanted to ask your thoughts on the status, so at the moment the script shows as "stopped". I found this a bit confusing when using the manual:yes.

Could I suggest a new status called "manual" or perhaps setting "ready" like it's waiting for the condition of manually running to be fufilled?

This way I can look at the list and instantly know the status.

[hongkongkiwi]

I also found that if a task that's set with manual:yes task exits with non zero exit code, then will show as "stopped". So there's no way to know if it was run and succeeded, waiting to be run or ran and failed.

I was hoping to get a clear overview of the system by looking at the initctl status command .

[troglobit]

OK, hope this helps:

Status : stopped (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS, manual=yes)

• The stopped keyword only means it's in that state in the Finit state machine, ready already exists and shows service/run/task waiting for a condition to go to running.
• The actual exit status is status=0/SUCCESS. You get the new manual=yes in there too.

A manual:yes task that exits with a non-zero exit code looks like this:

Status : stopped (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE, manual=yes)

To make this easier to script we have #273 which I hope to get back to soon as well.

[troglobit]

This one kept bugging me. So I decided to change the implementation for manaul:yes run/tasks slightly in 96257cc. With this last change all run/tasks end up in state done instead of manual:yes tasks going to stopped.

Calling initctl start foo still restarts them, only change is the end state. Hope this helps.

[hongkongkiwi]

Great!! I like it :) I will test it after a code merge this week