[17:04] <jp_larocque> What's the best way to figure out why upstart is blocking system startup on something?  I'm having a heck of a time trying to write a couple of upstart job definitions.
[17:57] <jp_larocque> Well, I'm disappointed to report that after maybe 6 hours across a few days of trying to do this the right way, the only tractible solution was to mangle existing definitions to call old /etc/init.d scripts.  Upstart is just way too complicated for me, and I can't predict how it makes decisions, or what it's doing.
[18:06] <JanC> did you enable verbose logging?
[18:07] <JanC> jp_larocque: are you using http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/ ?
[18:08] <JanC> http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/#debugging
[19:54] <jp_larocque> JanC: Verbose logging told me that my jobs weren't starting, and the lack of activity told me that there was a deadlock, but not the cause of either.
[19:55] <jp_larocque> I have been reading through a bit of the cookbook, but not the entire thing.  I probably could have done more research before giving up.
[19:55] <JanC> in that case, you'll have to see what the start conditions for the jobs that don't start are?
[20:00] <jp_larocque> Well, I wrote the job definitions.  For the "setkey" defintion, there were no start conditions (which I think means start at any point not further restricted by other definitions), and for the "racoon" definition the start condition was "start on (started setkey and starting mountall-net)".
[20:00] <jp_larocque> Which I optimistically thought meant that upstart would ensure setkey starts before racoon, and the start of mountall-net is blocked until racoon is started.
[20:01] <JanC> no start conditions means it will only start when you start it manually?
[20:01] <jp_larocque> But I'm having a hard time finding precise language that specifies how jobs are ordered.
[20:01] <jp_larocque> Oh?  I had not realized that.
[20:04] <JanC> you can use "start on startup" to start a job ASAP
[20:04] <jp_larocque> But having upstart print something along the lines of "racoon blocked until `started job=setkey' event" would be immensely helpful in troubleshooting these issues.
[20:05] <JanC> although "start on startup" means that it might start before filesystems are available etc.
[20:05] <jp_larocque> Yeah.
[20:06] <JanC> maybe that's okay, or maybe you want some other event to start it on
[20:06] <jp_larocque> Anyway, thought I'd provide some feedback on why I gave up.  I could easily waste many more hours trying to get this done the right way, but I'm ready to have a booting computer with IPsec-protected NFS home directories now.  =)
[20:07] <jp_larocque> Thanks for the information.