Re: enable/disable flags in /etc/default
On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 08:30:24PM +0100, Olaf van der Spek wrote:
> > time the package is upgraded. i mean, it's not even that great for
> > maintainer scripts, as evidenced by the total inconsistency for how
> > developers are managing enabling/disabling of their services.
>
> Isn't that handled by DH for simple cases?
i don't think the simple cases are the problems here. the problems arise
on the maintainer side when they want to do anything different from the
standard boilerplate dh stuff, like for example conditionally enable/disable
a service. i actually attempted to do this The Right Way once with nsca,
and it was really hard and involved lots of querying of invoke-rc.d.
On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 11:58:44PM +0100, Stig Sandbeck Mathisen wrote:
> The "short term" issue is figuring out if the current practice of
> DONT_DISABLE_ENABLEMENT=false and friends in /etc/default is something
> we want to keep doing.
i would guess that the numbers are already overwhelmingly in favor of
abandoning this practice, if it were reasonably easy and straightforward
to do.
> The "long term" issue is having a toolset, for the end user, for
> starting and stopping services, enabling and disabling services when
> booting, installing and upgrading, and setting a global policy for what
> the initial status of an installed service should be.
i'd agree with Russ that doing this sooner rather than later would
actually accelerate the abandonment of the practice.. that is i don't
think most people are doing it because they think "this is how it should
be done", but rather "i can't find a better way to do it".
> A RHEL service can be started manually, but will not be started at
> system boot unless explicitly configured to do so with "chkconfig".
and in our case it's renaming a symlink with sysv init, but i find
it extremely irritating that we can't just provide a damn wrapper
for that on out of the box installs so debian works like every other
linux system out there with a reasonably sane chkconfig and/or service
interface.
On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 09:24:52PM -0600, Raphael Geissert wrote:
> Olaf van der Spek wrote:
> > So what *is* the proper UI?
>
> Interesting that everyone talks about update-rc.d but it appears that nobody
> has read its documentation:
>
> > A common system administration error is to delete the links with
<snip>
>
> That means:
> # mv /etc/rc2.d/S??apache2 /etc/rc2.d/K00apache2
> # insserv # this bit is not documented, it seems
>
> And that's it, apache2 won't be started on runlevel 2.
and that's pretty much how it works on every other linux/unix like
(sysv anyway, modulo changing some paths) system out there, at least
under the hood.
...but that's not an interface, that's an implementation detail. a very much
nonzero number of people are very confused when coming to debian because
the tools that they've come to learn and use on other linux systems aren't
present, and when they google or ask on support channels they're given a mixture
of sometimes conflicting answers.
i spoke with steve briefly on irc this morning and he mentioned that there
were some (perhaps-unpublished?) notes from the DebConf BoF on init systems,
does anyone still have a copy of those? is there any other central place
where this stuff is being discussed?
sean
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