dpkg: start-stop-daemon should check that the daemon has stopped

[hilliard@flinet.com]

Package: dpkg
Version: 1.6.9
Severity: wishlist

     There have been two bug reports submitted this week (Bug#59321
against dictd and Bug#59321 against pipsecd) that were caused by
calling start-stop-daemon with -start immediately following a
start-stop-daemon call using -stop.  Occasionally the daemon has not
been stopped when the start command is received.  If the --quiet
option has been used with start-stop-daemon, no error message is
emitted.

     Both bugs were fixed by inserting a sleep command between the
--stop and --start commands.  

     This is not a guaranteed solution, however. If the system is
busy and if the daemon has been swapped out, it might take an
undetermined amount of time for it to shutdown.

     One solution would be for start-stop-daemon to wait on the PID of
the process being killed, with a time limit so it would not hang if a
process refused to shutdown when signalled.

-- System Information
Debian Release: 2.2
Kernel Version: Linux bobspc 2.2.12 #1 Tue Oct 12 14:21:00 EDT 1999 i586 unknown

Versions of the packages dpkg depends on:
ii  libc6          2.1.3-5        GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone
ii  libncurses5    5.0-5          Shared libraries for terminal handling