Hi all, tldr: why is not having a daemon started on install so involved? Can't there be a better way?
I'm hacking around an ansible playbook that needs to configure an etcd cluster. The problem is that installing the package will automatically start the daemon cluster in a "default" configuration. That's a problem for me because etcd differentiates between starting the cluster for the first time and starting it subsequentially. The first time is special as it generates some internal state. So I would like to control whether etcd - or for the matter any service - is started upon package installation. I imagine that this would be quite a standard requirement for devops/configuration tools aka "please do not run and configure the service for me because I want to do it precisely **this way**" (which is kinda the point of configration automation). Nota bene: that requirement does not criticise Debian packagers nicely integrating all things - which is of huge value for the task. When I duckduckgo "dpkg do not start service on install" first hit is [1] which contains /absurdly involved/ suggestions to achieve "not starting a daemon upon installation". It /seems/ that the "official" way to achieve "not starting a daemon upon installation" is to use `dpkg-divert` to overwrite `policy-rc.d` with a script that exits with 101. This to me seems again like a awkward, byzantine and brittle way to achieve that goal. Also, the only canonical documentation of policy-rc.d seems to be /usr/share/doc/init-system-helpers/README.policy-rc.d.gz, which is quite cryptic, contains no examples and contains "rc.d" in its name in a world where systemd is the default, which makes me doubt whether all packages using systemd will respect policy-rc.d... So I'm wondering: * is this really the official (twisted ?8-o) way to solve the problem of not starting a daemon automatically upon installation? * why was such an involved method chosen, instead of say setting an environment variable DPKG_DONT_START_DAEMON or such? I'm writing to d-d because I think this is a fundamental distro problem that's worth a thought/discussion/improvement. ? Waves- *t [1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/74061/install-packages-without-starting-background-processes-and-services#