Comment 33 for bug 94065

On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Scott James Remnant
<email address hidden> wrote:
> The feature planned for the next release is the support of override
> files, which augment configuration files, so you'll be able to do:
>
>  echo manual >> /etc/init/apache.override

I think that is a smart choice provided we are cautious about the
frequency that this gets leveraged.

I would expect the following cases to be true:

1) override
apache.conf: start on runlevel [45]
apache.override: start on runlevel [2345]
result: start on runlevel [2345]

2) manual
apache.conf: start on runlevel [45]
apache.override: manual
result: upstart does not control the service

3) scripts
apache.conf: pre-start script \ #blahblahblah
apache.override: pre-start script \ #foofoofoo
result: ONLY pre-start script \ #foofoofoo

Which is to stay, I would expect each stanza to act as an object that
you could overwrite from the override file to avoid having to change
the upstream configuration. Override files would never be part of a
package as a rule, and thus could be fully owner by a user. Still, an
external script or a configuration management system, would have to
edit this file to start or stop a service. This is less than ideal,
but solves the concerns about conflicting with packaging. Besides,
this file should be nonexistent in the majority of cases.

In my scenarios, having the existence of /etc/init/apache.manual
trigger upstart to not automatically start or stop the service, but
allow it to be manually started by the user, would be preferred. I
recognize upstart is driven by the characteristics of desktop services
and this could come off as configuration file cruft in those use
cases. This would be preferable for developers to invoke a permanent
programmatic change from a script.