Re: dh_installinit...

[Thomas -Balu- Walter <debian@b-a-l-u.de>]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 02:04:52PM +0200, Thomas Hood wrote:
> Don't try to control the exit status with an environment variable.
> Let the initscript return a nonzero status.  If you need to ignore
> the status (because you have "set -e") then append '|| :' to the
> line that returns the error status.

You got me a little wrong.
This is what I want to do, but I do not want the initscript to return a
nonzero status all the time. An error status code returned by the init
script is a very nice feature e.g. if an admin starts the script
manually he might want to check the status code. Making it return a nonzero
status code all the time is a bad idea because of this.

However - my problem is that the start of the daemon might fail (because
a video device is not attached e.g.) during postinst. This failure
should not break the postinst but simply display a message or similar.

So I put the following into the start segment of the init script:

    if [ "$RUNNING_IN_POSTINST" = "1" ]; then
            start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --chuid camsource:video \
                    --exec $DAEMON || \
                    echo "Please make sure that a video device exists or"\
                         "configure camsource to use a different source."
    else
            start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --chuid camsource:video \
                    --exec $DAEMON
    fi

$RUNNING_IN_POSTINST is set in postinst then and will start the daemon, but
return a non-error status code and print a message. The problem then will not
break postinst.

If $RUNNING_IN_POSTINST is not set - the daemon gets started as it should be
and returns the correct error code. 

My question is just if there is a variable I can check that already exists in
contrast to creating my own $RUNNING_IN_POSTINST.

-- Balu