Jesse Smith writes ("Bug#586709: Think I found the problem"):
> [implementation details]Thanks for looking at this bug. I'm afraid I don't think I agree that it should be closed, though. AFAICT the user's complaint is that, when halt or poweroff actually invoke shutdown, the actual halt/poweroff action is chosen differently to the situation when halt or poweroff does the work itself. That seems contrary to the behaviour described in halt(8). So at the very least the manpage is wrong. However: I took a look at halt(8), shutdown(8) and the comment in /etc/default/halt. Frankly, the situation is confusing and ill-documented. The interactions of the various options to halt, and the various options to shutdown (which, confusingly, use some of the same lowercase letters for different things) are not properly explained. I think the best solution here would *not* be to attempt to describe the current actual behaviour in the manpages. Rather, it would be to try to write down what the desired behaviour would be, and then document and implement it. ISTM that one key principle of that desired behaviour is that the ultimate stopping behaviour of halt/reboot/poweroff should be the same, regardless of whether it works by calling shutdown, or by doing the work itself right away. > Long answer: The script is basically set up to work on auto-pilot and > use /etc/default/halt as the only way to pass in parameters. If necessary (which seems likely), halt(8) could leave a dropping in /run or something to tell the init script what to do. Thanks, Ian.
