Re: slink -> potato

[Raul Miller <raul@usatoday.com>]

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