finit/doc/TODO.md

Goals of Finit

Initially Finit aimed to be more than a processes monitor, acting as a replacement for cron/at and inetd as well. Over time, however, the true value in the project turned out to be:

A simple SysV init and systemd replacement, primarily for embedded systems, container, and dedicated server applications.

Near Future

• ... when inetd support has been removed, we can refactor the .conf parser, parse user input in a separate process, move process monitor to separate process (same as parser?), and possibly even ...
• ... add new (complimentary) .svc file format to slowly migrate away from the very terse one-liner format currently used.
• When a process dies, and Finit does not restart it, we should collect a siginfo_t from the SIGCHLD signal and supply to the user in case initctl status <process> is called to debug the issue.
• Add finit.conf support for UPS notification (SIGPWR) to start a task using, e.g. <sys/power/{ok,fail,low}> conditions. More info in sig.c
• Add finit.conf support for ctrl-alt-delete (SIGINT) and kbrequest, i.e. KeyboardSignal, (SIGWINCH) behavior. Using conditions to a task, e.g, <sys/key/ctrlaltdel> and <sys/key/signal> like SIGPWR handling.
• Write man pages for finit and finit.conf, steal from the excellent pimd man pages ...

General

• Add support for timed shutdown in Finit, including cancelled shutdown, possibly using an at-job, see crond section below

• Add support for JSON output, or similar, from initctl show, e.g. initctl show --json

• Solaris SMF (Service Management Facility) has some interesting features that may be well worth looking into adopting:

     svcs enable -rt svc:/network/ssh:default
  

  That is: (r)esolve dependencies and only enable ssh (t)emporary in the default runlevel when networking is available.

• initctl add /sbin/service -n -- Service description, for details see above Solaris SMF featuer, issue #55 and issue #69, https://github.com/troglobit/finit/issues/69#issuecomment-287907610

• Changing the name of a pidfile, pid:[/path/]file.pid, after a service has been started is not supported atm. The previous name will not be (never) removed and the new name will not be created until the process has been stopped and started again.

• PID files created in subdirectories to /run is not supported right now inotify listeners should be automatically created (and removed) when a subdirectory is added (or removed).

Init

Finit in itself is not SysV Init compatible, it doesn't use /etc/rc.d and /etc/init.d scripts to boot the system. However, a plausible way to achieve compatibility would be to add a plugin to finit which reads /etc/inittab to be able to start standard Linux systems.