Hi folks, On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 11:55:51AM -0500, Eloy Paris wrote: > [Adding Steve Langasek to his discussion since I know he can provide > valuable technical advise here.]
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 12:41:21AM +0100, Toni Mueller wrote: > > On Mon, 14.01.2008 at 06:56:40 +1000, Andrew Pollock > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Well I think that goes against the general behaviour of Debian > > > packages that are servers. The general logic seems to be that if you > > > want a server package installed, you want it running. I think you'll > > > find that most servers are started in the postinst. > > I beg to disagree. Many daemons already have such things in their > > default scripts. A quick sample on one of my computers show these > > packages to have something like a start switch in their default > > script: > > 4ss, amule, apache2, avahi-daemon, bittorrent, bluetooth, cfengine2, > > cryptdisks, dbus, distcc, exim4, fetchmail, firehol, libzvbi0, > > lighttpd, mdadm, nfs-common, oidentd, partimaged, pound, rrdcollect, > > rsync, setkey, smartmontools, snmpd, uml-utilities. > > This may be not a complete survey, but it shows that having such a > > facility is far from being uncommon. Sadly, yes, it's far from being uncommon; but it's really a crude workaround for the lack of a user-friendly interface for manipulating runlevel policies in Debian (by manipulating the /etc/rcX.d links; probably not using policy-rc.d, since sysvinit itself doesn't use invoke-rc.d when changing runlevels). Personally, I fear that the more of these /etc/default/foo options are added, the less likely it is that we'll ever get sane runlevel editing. > I believe the current accepted way to prevent services/daemons/servers > from starting at boot time is to manipulate the /etc/rcX.d links. I've > seen some packages remove /etc/default/<package> support recently. > I do agree that people may not want to run a server even if they have > the server package installed. However, having the init script source > /etc/default/<package> is not the correct way to go. Yes, quite agreed. > What I personally do to prevent servers from starting at boot time is > something along the lines of: > # cd /etc/rc2.d > # move S20samba K20samba > # cd /etc/rc3.d > # move S20samba K20samba > etc. After doing this any future invocations of invoke-rc.d will not > mess with my preferences. Right. > My recommendation is that we close this bug since adding logic > to the init script to not start based on configuration in > /etc/default/<package> is not the way to go based on what I am seeing. FWIW, the Technical Committee recently ruled on this precise question on another package; this is bug #412976, which I see we never fully closed out on the TC side since the bug wasn't formally assigned to us (whee, we're so good), but at any rate the voting record can be found at <http://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2007/12/msg00026.html> ff. and was a 4:1 vote upholding the maintainer's decision not to implement a start flag in /etc/default/$package. That said, if any of you felt this was an important itch to scratch, I would love to see someone lead discussion on and implement a sane front-end to the rc.d symlink handling so we could solve this once for all packages. Cheers, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
