On Sun, Oct 03, 1999 at 08:56:23AM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote: > The idea is that when you upgrade the package like telnetd, there > may be new shlib dependencies, etc. which means that you should stop > spawning new daemons until it is configured. Of course, this may > not happen for every release, but the prerm file comes from the old > version, so it can't tell whether this is necessary, but it is the > only one that knows exactly how to stop the daemon from spawning, so > it just has to stop it every time.
Note that there can be an extended period between unpack and configure. Especially if there's a package that needs a prompt answered that hits in this interval. [Imagine that you're running dpkg under screen and a network outage drops your connection.] As far as I know, leaving inetd accepting connections would, worst case, fail -- which is no different from having the service disabled. In other words, I don't see that disabling the daemon solves anything useful. [Aside: I never become root over a non-encrypted session, except in very unusual circumstances -- and even there I try to minimize the number unencrypted ip hops, but that's a different issue.] -- Raul