launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

So, starting services that we need just in time.

I'm totally +1 on this.

What it broadly needs:
 - some way to install but not run (at all) system services such as
apache, which can be custom per-thing, we just need to ensure that
when you install the thing *via* the lp-developer-deps that this
happens.
    one way would be to depend on e.g. lp-apache | apache, and
lp-apache would do the disabling stuff; it would only be pulled in if
apache wasn't already installed.

 - glue to configure-and-run those services when we need them. This
could take [at least] two forms:
   - system wide configs (e.g. like the apache site we use) and we
start the service
   - transient configs generated on  the fly just for use (and then we
run the binary with only our config)
Clearly system wide configs is what we use for apache and postgresql,
and we may want to where the service is particularly costly to bring
up; but we don't need to stop there.

I'm not *personally* driven to improve this area yet, because I think
the incremental benefits are small compared to concurrent test runs,
for instance. It does have the potential to make it dramatically
easier to get setup developing on LP though, which would be awesome.

-Rob