initctl: provide human friendly state descriptions

[Chris Jones]

The current output of start/stop/restart/status is very terse, machine readable and conveys precise information about the current state and the goal state of an Upstart job. These qualities are all very appropriate if the output of the tools is being fed to other tools/scripts, but can be confusing for simple human brains.

As a busy sysadmin with a simple human brain I would massively appreciate these tools being slightly more explicit (e.g. I typically only care about the current state unless it's in the middle of changing state)

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

The "right" way to do this is probably just to re-use that --verbose flag, ie.

  # status dbus
  dbus is running, process 4238

  # status -v dbus
  dbus start/killed, process 4238

[Gabe Mc (gabemc)]

Same deal, different angle. I really want to replace all of my init scripts with upstart, but the output is pretty unfriendly to scripting currently.

Output should be formatted more easily for parsing by programs like awk. It should always follow a convention like 'ps':

STATUS PID STARTED ON JOB
start/killed 4324 July 24 10:34:05 UTC dbus
stop/waiting 3245 July 24 10:34:07 UTC splash-manager
start/killed 7123 July 25 11:32:10 UTC parent-task
start/killed 7124 July 25 11:32:10 UTC child-task PARENT=parent-task JOB=job1
start/killed 7125 July 25 11:32:11 UTC child-task PARENT=parent-task JOB=job2
start/killed 7126 July 25 11:32:12 UTC child-task PARENT=parent-task JOB=job3