[15:37] <bn_work> do you guys have any Upstart usage stats?  I am trying to get a vendor to add support for Upstart but they are calling it an "obscure daemon manager" :/
[15:38] <bn_work> I mean is Upstart basically dead now?  I've seen no site updates since 2014... 
[15:50] <xnox> bn_work, it is stable and maintained; meaning we provide stable series maintainance and security support only.
[15:50] <xnox> bn_work, modern releases of Debian and Ubuntu have stopped using it, nor providing it.
[15:50] <xnox> bn_work, e.g. 16.04 LTS and onwards only support systemd as the system pid 1.
[15:51] <xnox> bn_work, the only remaining users of upstart in production that I know of, are older Ubuntu releases e.g. 12.04 LTS ESM, 14.04 LTS, Chrome OS, Amazon Kindle, Some LG TV, and possibly some fridges.
[15:52] <xnox> bn_work, i would recommend providing a systemd unit to anyone shipping daemons, that are capable of being run on linux kernel.
[16:01] <bn_work> xnox:  thanks for the comment, then I guess systemd has truly won.  Seems odd Canonical would not even offer it as an unsupported "option", in the spirit of being open.   
[16:02] <bn_work> If maintenance patches are still provided why are there no announcements about it on upstart.ubuntu.com?  (BTW, the revision history link on the dev page http://upstart.ubuntu.com/development.html seems broken, FYI:    http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~scott/upstart/trunk)
[16:04] <xnox> bn_work, Ubuntu Project (community) has always been focused on providing great user experience, and thus good, sane and obvious default choices. Therefore, we have only ever supported one system init system at the time, and e.g. dropped sysv-init support a very long time ago; when we moved to upstart. Later the project switched to systemd. Canonical, supports even a smaller subset of Ubuntu flavours.
[16:04] <xnox> bn_work, for example, Lubuntu is community supported; and Canonical does not provide support that (it supports the common core/base system bit that Lubuntu is built on top)
[16:05] <xnox> * support for that
[16:05] <xnox> Canonical is focused on supporting Public/Private Cloud, Server, Core, Desktop (used to be Unity, now Gnome), IoT.
[16:06] <xnox> bn_work, it is out of scope for the Ubuntu Project to support multiple choices of common/core things. hence Ubuntu project doesn't support multiple kernels, multiple init systems, multiple libc, etc. unlike e.g. Debian.
[16:07] <xnox> bn_work, "If maintenance patches are still provided" -> well, they are provided, in a sense that we are expecting an escalation of a L3 issue, and/or a security bug found =) but there haven't been any for a few years now. Hence, upstart is stable =)
[16:08] <xnox> bn_work, if there will be one, we will update something, but most likely it will be just an Ubuntu Security Notice or Ubuntu SRU, and a patch on the mailing list, and matching VCS commits =)
[16:08] <xnox> i have not been summoned to fix upstart, in years now, and I hope it will stay like that =)
[16:08] <xnox> note upstart is part of the extended security maintainance of Ubuntu.
[16:09] <xnox> so i'm still on stand-by for that in 2019+
[16:12] <xnox> Thu, 19 May 2016 12:04:29 +0100 -> sounds about right, for the last time upstart had an update.
[17:10] <bn_work> xnox: ok, thanks