Issue 162: monotone does not signal server startup failure - A distributed version control system

Reported by Francis Russell, Apr 11, 2011

I've observed this issue when debugging with Debian, but I believe 
it applies to all Unix-like distributions. When starting the 
monotone server, there needs to be a way to signal this to the 
startup script.

The preferred way is (apparently) that the server process does its 
own forking of the child, and the started process terminates with an 
exit code that signifies if the daemon was started successfully. 

Alternatively, if the demon process does not fork. The process that 
starts to daemon will need to take responsibility for the 
backgrounding, and a failure to start can be detected by the lack of 
a pid-file.

As far as I can tell, monotone does not support backgrounding for 
"mtn serve", and creates a pid-file even when the server 
fails to start properly.

Having mtn serve return an exit code when it can't start isn't 
helpful since the startup script should only block for as long as is 
needed to know if the daemon has started correctly.

Comment 1 by Francis Russell, Apr 11, 2011

Actually, it doesn't look like Debian's start-stop-daemon will 
complain about a lack of a PID file either. Presumably it only uses 
it to stop the daemon.

Comment 2 by Richard Levitte, Apr 21, 2011

Either way, I've also always wondered why the server part doesn't 
signal failure...  usher checks the first line it sends on stderr, 
which is really quite silly...  It might be time to have a closer 
look at this.