Here is a little howto to get upstart running on Gentoo
1.) Check out my upstart overlay:
cd /usr/local
bzr branch http://www.michaelbiebl.de/gentoo/upstart-overlay
2.) Make this overlay available to portage. Edit /etc/make.conf and add:
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/upstart-overlay"
3.) Right now, we have to run upstart in so-called "compat mode". This basically means, that we are using the sysv initscripts. For this, add the following use flags to /etc/portage/package.use:
echo "sys-apps/sysvinit compat-only" >> /etc/portage/package.use
echo "sys-apps/upstart-jobs sysv" >> /etc/portage/package.use
echo "sys-apps/upstart sysv" >> /etc/portage/package.use
4.) Now emerge the updated sysvinit package (which installs only some support binaries), upstart and upstart-jobs
emerge -va sysvinit upstart upstart-jobs
That's all. Now you are ready to reboot your system and start investigating upstart. Please keep in mind, that as we are running in compat mode, your boot procedure will exactly be the same as before and neither slower nor faster.
The next major step obviously is, to translate the sysv initscripts to native upstart jobs. I will leave this task to more seasoned Gentoo developers though.
I would also appreciate if some more experienced Gentoo Developers review these ebuilds and push them directly downstream into the Gentoo distribution.
Cheers, Michael Biebl
There is also a bug report in Gentoo's bugzilla: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150190