Aaron Toponce <aaron.toponce@gmail.com> writes:
> I'm trying to dig through the archives to see if this has been discussed,
> and I'm only finding random one-off discussions here and there about it.
> Nothing concrete. If it has already been discussed in great detail, my
> apologies.
It has -- repeatedly.
This is almost certainly going to result in a long and pointless thread,
to go with a long series of similarly long and pointless threads. *sigh*
> I would be interested in the opinions of the rest of the development
> community on this, and why Debian handles services the way it does
> currently. For comparison, Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux do not start
> a service after install. {Free,Open,Net}BSD start some, but never on
> external interfaces. AFAIK, Arch Linux does not any services by default
> after installation. . It seems that only Debian-based operating
> systems do.
The reason that RedHat don't start things is that their default approach
has been to install a whole load of stuff that you might possibly want,
and allow you to enable it when you are inspired to give some new
service a try.
The Debian approach has always been to not install anything that you
don't intend to use. It is also to ensure that if you do choose to
install something, it should be doing something useful by the end of the
install (if possible, security considerations allowing).
That is also why Debian and RedHat diverge when it comes to prompting
the user for configuration questions -- RedHat just want the software to
install, whereas Debian wants it to be useful, so may need to ask
questions.
It also leads to the fact that you can do major release upgrades of
Debian, whereas that's not really supported in RedHat, as chances are
your configuration is going to get trashed to some extent, and they
don't have the chance to ask you what you want to do about it.
Both approaches are valid, and are mostly a matter of taste. If you
are using a distribution that uses one assumption, it's not useful to
start introducing packages that work on the opposite assumption.
If you don't like the assumptions, you are much better off switching to
a distribution that you prefer, rather than trying to persuade the
overwhelming majority of the people that like the current assumptions,
and use Debian because of those assumptions, that they should change
their minds because they are supposedly wrong for liking it that way.
Cheers, Phil.
--
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