Re: Request for Comments: Standardize enabling/disabling of system services

[Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi>]

ke, 2009-04-01 kello 20:30 +0200, Patrick Schoenfeld kirjoitti:
> You finished reading my mail after that paragraph, didn't you? ;)

Pretty much. It looked long and complicated and I was in a hurry. I
skimmed it but I see now I missed that you actually knew about
policy-rc.d.

Let me make amends by suggesting you _not_ have packages modify a
hypothetical /etc/rc.conf file, and instead invent a /etc/rc.conf.d
directory. It's been one of the lessons learned by Debian that modifying
configuration files in a lot of maintainer scripts is error-prone,
whereas having packages include configuration files in .d directories is
almost foolproof.

I would keep things simpler, though. Let package maintainers exercise
their best judgement as to whether their services should be started upon
package install or not, and provide an optional default implementation
of policy-rc.d (i.e., something not installed by default, at least not
until it has proven itself) that reads /etc/policy-rc.d.conf to see
which services to allow and which not. Syntax might be something like
this:

        Deny *
        AllowPriority standard important required
        Allow apache2

Default should be to allow everything. Allow sysadmin to match either
names or package priorities.

This still lets packages use whatever /etc/default/$package variables
they wish, but I'm fine with that.