policy-rc.d by default?

[Apollon Oikonomopoulos <apoikos@debian.org>]

On 14:13 Fri 04 Nov     , Luca Capello wrote:
> I still think that a non-manual upgrade (i.e. an upgrade which has not
> been checked by a manual process, which means that a scripted upgrade is
> not part of it) should not be a default on any OS, but it seems I am the
> only one thinking like this...

While enabling unattended-upgrades by default is definitely a step
towards better security, it would be great if we could also provide
users/admins with an easy opt-out mechanism for certain services,
especially if we want unattended upgrades to be usable on production
machines.

Currently unattended-upgrades provides a package blacklist that can be
manually configured to exclude certain packages from upgrades. While
this is useful in its own right, I think we should eventually provide an
easy-to-configure policy-rc.d mechanism (possibly integrated with
debconf?) to provide what most people eventually want: a "please don't
restart my apache or mysql automatically" kind of behaviour.

> > We should also enable needsrestart, whatmaps, checkrestart or
> > similar to restart affected services after these upgrades otherwise the
> > e.g. openssl update might go without effect until openssh, bind,
> > <younameit> get restarted manually or rebooted.
>
> Should not we recycle how the debpkg:libc6 handles affected-debpkgs or,
> better, should not we unify libc6 behavior with the tools Guido
> suggested?

libc6 can obviously not depend on any of these tools for the restart behavior.
Still it could detect the presence of those tools and skip its own
restart logic accordingly.

Cheers,
Apollon