README

Upstart is an event-based replacement for the /sbin/init daemon which
handles starting of tasks and services during boot, stopping them
during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running.

It is intended to be suitable for deployment in all Linux
distributions as a replacement for the venerable sysvinit package.

Feature highlights:

 * Tasks and Services are started and stopped by events;

 * Events are generated as tasks and services are started and stopped;

 * Events may be received from any other process on the system;

 * Services may be respawned if they die unexpectedly;

 * Supervision and respawning of daemons which separate from their
   parent process;

 * Communication with the init daemon over D-Bus.


Dependencies
------------

Since Upstart's primary usage will be on distributions that utilise
the user-space event mechanisms only found in recent Linux kernel
versions, it has been developed to take advantage of other operating
system and language features that may not be available in older
releases of the kernel, C library or compiler.

The recommended versions are:

	* Linux 2.6.24 or later
	* GCC 4.1 or later
	* GNU C Library (glibc) 2.4 or later

Communication with other processes utilises the D-Bus messaging
system.  In order to query the availibility of the external library,
the pkg-config tool is used; and in order to generate the D-Bus
bindings necessary, the expat XML parsing library will be used.

The recommended versions are:

	* pkg-config 0.22
	* D-Bus 1.2.16
	* expat 2.0.0

These should all be available from the current release of any modern
Linux distribution.

For detailed compilation and installation instructions see the INSTALL
file.  If you've checked Upstart out from revision control, or want to
hack on Upstart, see the HACKING file.