[OpenIndiana-discuss] How to document SMF facilities for an upstream package

[Gordon Ross]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Gary Mills <mills at cc.umanitoba.ca> wrote:
> I've just completed writing a spec file to build an IPS package for
> the ISC DHCP server.  I haven't made any changes to the source for
> this product, and don't want to.  That should all be done upstream.

Sometimes it's not that simple though. There's a lot of magic in SMF
(and even more in "ctfs" - contracts) so you can't necessarily just take
some open-source server program and run it as an SMF service.
As an example, I saw a problem with Samba where it did fork/exec of
some helper process (printing? I forget what) where that process died
with a fatal signal, and SMF took the whole service "offline".  The issue
here is that there are rules for running as an SMF service, which you
sometimes can't just ignore.  Something to watch out for.

I belive there are relatively simple ways around the problems, i.e.
using "ctrun" to start programs "outside" of the parent's contract,
but I'll let others more knowledgeable on SMF provide guidance.

> [...]  How should I document the SMF facilities?
[... service FMRI, properties, RBAC privileges...]

In a case like this, I think it's practical to handle the illumos-specific
parts like this as a local patch. Unless the upstream wants to carry
system specific stuff like that and pre-process it away somehow on
other systems were it does not apply.

Gordon