Dear Debian developers, I would like to consult the developer community on the following issue.
Here is the story: Debian packages including daemons may be a problem for people installing them via chroot, due to the fact that the packages will typically try to stop and restart the daemons. In fact, this can interact destructively with the system of the server, accidentally killing this or that process. It may also cause the Debian package tools to crash. Installation via chroot can be very useful for embedded systems, and also for diskless machines that boot remotely from a server and mount the root via NFS. If a package is being installed via chroot running in the server it does not really make any sense to try to stop or start daemons. Although most packages do in fact survive this process, in the sense that the installation completes despite some errors when stopping and starting daemons, some do cause the package tools to exit in error, leaving behind a broken package. One example that is particularly troublesome is rwhod. Now, all this can be avoided very simply by a line in the init.d/ script for the daemon, checking that /proc is mounted. Since it will be mounted on normal systems but typically not when using a chroot shell, it serves as a flag to enable the daemon restarting procedure. I am using successfully the following line to fix the situation in the case of the troublesome rwhod package, near the top of the file: test -e /proc/mounts || exit 0 So here are my questions: is there any way in which including a line like this in the init.d/ scripts can be adopted as a standard procedure in the future, for all Debian packages containing daemons? Are there, perhaps, undesirable side effects to this? Is there some other, better solution to this problem? Solving this problem would certainly help people using chroot to install packages and so help to extend the range of applicability and usefulness of Debian. Cheers, ---------------------------------------------------------------- Jorge L. deLyra, Associate Professor of Physics The University of Sao Paulo, IFUSP-DFMA For more information: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]