[sysvinit-devel] Second beta for startpar

[Jesse Smith]

During the testing of startpar-0.64-beta, a few issues were discovered.
Since these fixes, along with two new features were added to startpar, I
decided it would be a good idea to publish a second beta for people to
try. I'd like to make sure everyone has a chance to test
startpar-0.64-beta2 before it is declared stable and ready for public
consumption.

The big issue that was fixed for beta2 was there was a regression in
startpar which could cause the program to incorrectly identify a job as
interactive. When this happened jobs would get run in serial instead of
parallel, slowing down execution. This bug has been fixed and jobs are
now properly running in parallel (unless they really are interactive).

A second change is compiler optimizations have been turned on. startpar
now builds with -O2 by default. I'm not sure why this was not done
before, but it shrinks our executable by about 10%. If distributions do
not want optimizations they can be disabled by setting the OPT Makefile
variable (make OPT="").

The startpar program collects output from running jobs and outputs it,
usually in a big batch at the end of the job. Though sometimes startpar
can be told to flush output periodically using the -t and -T flags.
Since using -t or -T can cause output to appear half-done, startpar will
now append a newline (\n) character to the ends of lines which don't
include them. This makes output more orderly, especially in log files.

Finally, a new command line flag (-n) has been added. When -n is
specified on the command line, output is prefixed with the name of the
executable being run. Normally output looks like this:

Hello
World

With the -n flag it'll look like

Program-A: Hello
Program-B: World

I've done some basic testing, but we can always use more.
startpar-0.64-beta2 can be downloaded from the Savannah mirrors:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/sysvinit/

Please report bugs to this mailing list or our bug tracker:
https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=sysvinit

- Jesse