The daemontools-installer package modifies /etc/inittab to cause the svscan/svscanboot process to launch. With upstart, there is no /etc/inittab, instead it is replaced with a collection of config files in /etc/event.d. There's currently a bug for this misbehavior, however it is over a year old, but has the workaround documented.
The solution is to first create an empty, bogus /etc/inittab, then run the installer, and then put a manually created file in /etc/event.d to actually launch svscan.
- Create a bogus inittab,
touch /etc/inittab
- Install the installer,
apt-get install daemontools-installer
- Fetch the code,
get-daemontools
- Build the package,
build-daemontools
(and, of course, install it when prompted) - Create
/etc/event.d/svscan
- Run
initctl start svscan
- If desired,
rm /etc/inittab
The following is the contents of
/etc/event.d/svscan
:
start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5
stop on shutdown
respawn
exec /usr/bin/svscanboot
Now you will get the desired behavior of svscan starting at boot and being kept running by upstart.