Comment 2 for bug 611082

Scott, I believe Christian has a valid use-case for a service behavior. I too am requesting this option.

There's no way to accomplish the following: prevent a respawn without restarting the service or the host.

Consider the following:

1. Host is running a service that was started with upstart. The conf contains a "restart" stanza.
2. "restart" stanza is removed from host's configuration file
3. initctl reload-configuration is issued.
4. The service dies (or is killed). It's respawned -- it will always be respawned until it's explicitly restarted (restart <service>) or the host restarts.

As far as I can tell, there's no way to prevent the service from respawning without explicitly restarting the service. Is there a different way to accomplish this?

Even going as far as removing the conf file from the host will not prevent it from respawning.

This is true for upstart version 0.6.5, which is the default Upstart version in use in AWS's EMR4 ami image.