Less verbose debug output for initscript debugging

[Patrick Lauer <bugs@dev.gentooexperimental.org>]

Often when there's something not working you need to restart a service to see what fails. There's currently two verbosity levels: "almost none" and "spew as much as you can". For the use-case of debugging service startup it would be convenient to have an intermediate verbosity level that only shows the service name, the environment and the exact command that is being run.
That way all the other information, which is usually irrelevant to that task, doesn't distract from the current problem.

[roy]

Define the "exact command being run" for say the bootmisc init script.

[Patrick Lauer <bugs@dev.gentooexperimental.org>]

(In reply to comment #1)

Define the "exact command being run" for say the bootmisc init script.

example pseudo-output I'd like:

# /etc/init.d/foobar start --debug
[Starting foobar]
[Environment]
FOO="bar"
BAR="foo"
running command "start-stop-daemon --quiet /sbin/foobar --config /etc/conf.d/foobar --extra-parameter-salad"
ERROR: Failed to start foobar [!!!]

That way you don't need to work through 1000 lines of debug output and can easily see that /sbin/foobar is obviously wrong ;)
(I've hit that case with git-daemon where the executable moved, hanging processes etc. Ugly to debug when you don't get any logs from those nice daemons ...)

[roy]

roy@uberserver ~ $ /sbin/start-stop-daemon --quiet /bin/echox "hello world"

• start-stop-daemon: /bin/echox does not exist

As you can see, you get a nice warning about the real error. Also, you should not use the --quiet flag unless there is no other way of quieting the daemons output (not s-s-d's output, which by default is nothing).

Now, answer the question I asked in #1 :)

[roy]

I don't see how you can get anything more or less than what we already have.