Package: courier-mta
Version: 0.61.2-1
Severity: wishlist
Hi,
I'd like to run all components of courier under runit (which is a System V
init replacement and/or a service management package).
Some context:
Runit avoids many problems related to daemonised processes (mostly the pid
guessing game and unnecessary complexity in initscripts) by keeping daemons
in the foreground, each running as the child of a 'runsv' process that
manages its child.
Each service has a so-called 'run' script that's started by the runsv
process and that's responsible for setting up the initial environment of the
service, then exec the service so that the process which started out as the
shell running the run script doesn't exit as long as the service doesn't.
The runsv process can then be told to send signals to the service or to
automatically restart it when it exits.
Logging is also provided: runsv can open a pipe between the stdout of the
run script and the stdin of a logging process. This has advantages and
disadvantages compared to the traditional syslog approach which I won't go
into here.
The point is, all this works beautifully with courier-imap and
courier-authdaemon; it also appears to work with courierd itself, with the
following 'run' script:
--- snip ---
#!/bin/sh
exec 21
set -a
. /etc/courier/courierd
exec /usr/lib/courier/courier/courierd
--- snip ---
(I'm not yet sure what happens to courierd's log messages in this case.)
However, I couldn't find a way to start courierfilter so that it stays in
the foreground and preferably logs errors to stdout or stderr. Looking at
the source, I get the impression that the program goes out of its way to
daemonise and start a separate logging process, neither of which can
apparently be disabled.
Unfortunately I don't have what it takes to plough through liblock and
implement a clean solution for staying in the foreground and logging to
stderr, so I'm sending this wishlist report instead.
Ideally, there should probably be a command line option or an envvar that
disables daemonisation and another one that causes log messages to go to
stderr, but for me and other users of similar init replacements a single
option that does both would suffice.
People wanting to use daemontools or freedt with courier would face the same
issue, as would those who'd like to start courierfilter from inittab for
whatever reason.
Andras
--
Andras Korn korn at chardonnay.math.bme.hu
http://chardonnay.math.bme.hu/~korn/ QOTD:
Can February March? No, but April May...
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