[lxc-devel] [RFC] lxc-start: daemonize by default

[Christian Seiler]

Hi,

I'd like to hear some comments about the following:

With the release of LXC 1.0, lxc-shutdown and lxc-stop were merged
and now we have a really nice sane default to stopping containers:
Just run lxc-stop -n $container and LXC will try to shut down the
container and after a default of 60s it will forcibly kill it.
This is a very reasonable default for most things one does with
LXC, so this has become really user-friendly.

However, from personal experience, lxc-start is not quite as user-
friendly. In >95% of cases, I want to start a container in the
background and keep it running. There are some cases where I want
to have it in the foreground and get the output immediately, but
that is the exception (I am not talking about lxc-execute here,
just about lxc-start).

It has been several times that I have accidentally run lxc-start
without the -d flag and then had to shut the container down again
only to immediately try again with -d. Therefore, at least from
the way I use LXC, it seems to me to be much more sensible to
have lxc-start daemonize by default and instead provide flag to
keep it in the foreground, which seems to be a use case that is
rare in comparison.

Obviously, this shouldn't be done for the 1.0 branch, since this
breaks the given interface. But could we think about this for
the next release (or, if you want to be conservative, the
release after that with a warning in the next)? Thoughts?

Regards,
Christian