[17:37] <wrale1> hi.. i'm looking to use an upstart job (task?) to run a program (ansible-pull) periodically, in an end-to-end fashion.  that is, i want ansible-pull to run all the way through before the next run begins.  also, i'd like a sleep period to expire after ansible-pull runs.. i think i understand most of what i need to know.. however, i'm unsure of how best to do the loop.. it seems respawn only works for exit non-zero.. any ideas?
[20:59] <quizme> I'm writing a custom task.  In the upstart cookbook, it says that session jobs will be looked for in /usr/share/ustart/sessions, but I put a job there and it's not in the list of upstart jobs as advertised in the upstart cookbook.  but if i put my job in /etc/init, it's there.  :~(
[22:34] <xnox> quizme: /usr/share/upstart/session/* jobs are only in effect in graphical user sesions.
[22:34] <xnox> quizme: use e.g. $ initctl --system list
[22:34] <xnox> or $ initctl --user list
[22:34] <xnox> to tell them appart.
[22:34] <quizme> xnox oh
[22:35] <xnox> quizme: similarly $ initctl --system start | stop | restart, etc.
[22:35] <quizme> xnox is there a way to enable them on the server ?
[22:35] <xnox> quizme: not really no, but there is a hack/workaround in the cookbook as how to do it. (basically a system job that auto-launches per-user session for the users you want it for)
[22:36] <xnox> quizme: it's a bit tricky, because on terminal login, you need to query the UPSTART_SESSION var & set it for your self & also get some other vars.
[22:36] <xnox> but it should work =)
[22:37] <quizme> basically, I'm writing an application-specific task that i want to run once per hour.  for some reason I was thinking to use upstart instead of cron, is that wrong-headed ?
[22:39] <quizme> well i was planning to make an upstart task, then call the upstart task from cron.  Then an upstart even would fire when it was finished and run another job.
[22:39] <quizme> "upstart event would fire" i mean
[22:39] <quizme> xnox: what do u think?
[22:40] <quizme> xnox should i just use bash+cron minus upstart ?
[22:43] <xnox> quizme: there was a plan for temporal/periodic events.
[22:43] <xnox> quizme: one thing you need to keep in mind is that - you  cant start a running job again.
[22:44] <xnox> quizme: so your cron job can be: stop myjob; sleep 10; start myjob. and cron it to run once a day or some such.
[22:44] <xnox> quizme: cron is reliable way to do stuff.
[22:45] <xnox> quizme: you can instead emit events if you want via cron. E.g. cron every midnight to do $ initctl emit FOX_SAYS=midnight
[22:45] <xnox> or simly $ initctl emit midnight
[22:46] <xnox> and then your jobs can do "star on midnight" or "start on FOX_SAYS=midnight" or "start on FOX_SAYS"
[22:46] <quizme> oh yeah that's interesting
[22:46] <quizme> then when upstart takes over cron, my script will already work 
[23:45] <xnox> quizme: i don't think upstart will take over cron =) instead it will provide interface akeen of "start on every 5 minutes" or "start on 10 minutes after runlevel=2"
[23:53] <quizme> xnox oh, ok, i thought it was going to take over cron, and then the world.
[23:53] <xnox> quizme: no, upstart is event based init system. And it does events and it does init.
[23:56] <xnox> quizme: you may be thinking of systemd software collection, that project has an index page of daemons/commands that is does and plans to add even more http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/
[23:56] <xnox> This index contains 296 entries, referring to 144 individual manual pages.