PackagesAndProcesses

Keep Your Damn Process Management out of My Software Packages!

bucking the conventions I hereby put the tk;dr at the top of the page, to save you time

tl;dr USE DAEMONTOOLS

Anyway, I get paid the aeron chair money to manage software releases for a giant internet company. We push packages out to thousands of servers on pretty much a daily basis. I've learned a few things about large scale software packaging along the way. Today's topic of discussion: process management.

There's a natural tendency to conflate software packaging and process management. After all, if you install a package, you probably want to actually run the enclosed software, right? If this is a server then your software package is probably a service that

describe why including process management in software packages is a terrible idea, suggest alternatives.

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora_Draft_Documentation/0.1/html/RPM_Guide/ch09s04s05.html

http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ch-first.en.

http://redmine.stbuehler.de/projects/debianserver/wiki/Daemontools

http://code.dogmap.org./svscan-1/

zedshaw's procer: http://mongrel2.org/doc/tip/docs/manual/book.wiki#x1-410004