Re: daemons & clients

[Drake Diedrich <Drake.Diedrich@anu.edu.au>]

On Tue, Sep 22, 1998 at 07:45:20PM -0400, Justin Maurer wrote:
> 
> > > does anyone *else* think packages which contain both servers and clients
> > > (e.g, ssh) should prompt if the server should be run?
> > 
> > They should either prompt or not start the server.
> 
> this is not the case. both ssh and portmap (and mountd, possibly more) are
> started on boot. no postinst questions asked. should a bug be filed?
> should this become policy of some sort?

   I would prefer that postinst scripts check for config files before
prompting.  If a diligent sysadmin has preconfigured a package this could
save significant amounts of time.  The slow, manual Debian postinst process
is one reason so many Beowulfen are Redhat/Slackware based. Imagine
upgrading a 10,000 cpu farm and knowing you'll face the same 10 questions
10,000 times.
   For this particular case (ssh), the postinst question could be avoided by
splitting the package into -client and -server packages, and making the
reasonable assumption that a person installing the -server package wanted it
to run.  This would also save some space on the client-only machines.  Many
(most?) client/server packages are already split.  I should think about
splitting dqs I suppose..

-Drake