Re: the netbase/inetd conspiracy

[tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:

> There's no need to get snippy, least of all about something you've
> already indicated doesn't bother you.

I was trying to be funny, not snippy.  The point is that I understand
that people might not want to run inetd; that's not a reason to
exclude it (which is what I said originally).  This makes it exactly
like fileutils.

> It is easy to turn off, but that's not as good as it could be for two
> reasons: one is that you have to turn it off when the system can be
> smart enough to not turn it on it the first place if it's not needed,
> and the second is that if you don't want it turned on, by far the easiest
> and safest way of ensuring that is to not have it installed in the first
> place. Maybe you don't care about the difference, but other people do.

rm /etc/inetd.conf

1) makes sure it won't run, and that if it is run, it won't work;
2) is already the supported way of dealing in Debian.

Now, if you afraid that if the program exists it might start doing
something by magic, well, any program from fileutils might do that
too.  

::shrug::