Comment 11 for bug 839595

On Thu, 8 Sep 2011, Leo Milano wrote:

> Scott, is this how things are intended to work? My current understanding
> is:
>
>
> * "pre-start exec sleep N" means "wait up to N seconds for the
> preconditions to be satisfied". In this case, these are a network up and
> a fs up. I thought it meant "Wait at least N seconds", but I guess I was
> wrong.

No. 'pre-start exec sleep N' means that it will sleep for N in the
pre-start. And then nothing happens anywhere else (no 'start').

So basically all this job does is sleep for 120 seconds.

Then, rc.sysinit starts on :
  start on (filesystem and static-network-up) or started failsafe

So, it will start on the filesystem being available (which will happen
very early) and the network is up, *or* 120 seconds have passed since
'failsafe' started.

> * The current change makes the system to wait up to 120 seconds if the
> network is not brought up according to /etc/network/interfaces
>
> I think the latter is something that is not unlikely to happen for
> people who have been using different network managers and upgrading to
> new releases.

What network manager would have said to have that entry in
/etc/network/interfaces ? Even in the old behavior, having that entry
would stop NetworkManager from working for 'eth0'.
>
> Why would we do this? Isn't it better to proceed with the boot up even
> if the network is not fully up? Why is a network fully up a requirement
> to run rc-sysinit.conf?

Because things in svsvinit often expect (reasonably) to have a network.
Prior to there being upstart, the jobs there would have expected network,
and were sane in that expectation.