Issue 162 - monotone does not signal server startup failure (monotone)

Hello,

A new issue has been created and assigned
to you:

162 - monotone does not signal server startup failure
Project: monotone
Status: New
Reported by: Francis Russell
Labels:
 Type:Defect
 Priority:Medium

Description:

I've observed this issue when debugging with Debian, but I believe it applies to all Unix-like distributions. When starting the monotone server, there needs to be a way to signal this to the startup script.

The preferred way is (apparently) that the server process does its own forking of the child, and the started process terminates with an exit code that signifies if the daemon was started successfully. 

Alternatively, if the demon process does not fork. The process that starts to daemon will need to take responsibility for the backgrounding, and a failure to start can be detected by the lack of a pid-file.

As far as I can tell, monotone does not support backgrounding for "mtn serve", and creates a pid-file even when the server fails to start properly.

Having mtn serve return an exit code when it can't start isn't helpful since the startup script should only block for as long as is needed to know if the daemon has started correctly.

--
Issue: https://code.monotone.ca/p/monotone/issues/162/