Subject: bug#52654: shepherd lacks error reporting

From: raingloom <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2021 06:13:20 +0100

I'm writing a single-shot shepherd-service that expands the (ext4) root
file system on first boot, using the hostname service as a template,
just passing the script as a G-expression, instead of using the
forkexec constructor.
Of course there is a bug in it. Trouble is, I have no idea what it is,
because Shepherd won't tell me. :)
The VM boots and completes the ssh initialization phase and then
apparently just gets stuck. Doesn't even show a login prompt.
It's... not a great debugging experience.
I'm going to attempt to at the very least add some error reporting.
It would also be really nice if the failure modes for Shepherd services
were better documented, like what happens when the procedure passed in
the `start` field fails, or is not even a procedure, etc.
Since I never touched Shepherd internals, help would be greatly
appreciated.

ps.: I'm attaching the system definition for completeness's sake and so
that someone might point out where the error is, but honestly the exact
bug in my code does not matter for the feature. All that matters is
there is an error and it should be logged but isn't.