Re: Finger daemons in Debian should use a virtual package
> Hi good people,
>
> There are all sorts of daemons for various services in Debian, and there are
> services that have several daemons, and therefore several packages. To
> enable smoother transitions from one daemon to another, we have instated
> virtual packages which these packages can provide and conflict with.
>
> Although there is a possibility to run some of these servers simultaneously,
> by making them bind to different ports, it was agreed that the most common
> use is on the default port, and that until a more flexible solution (such as
> a debconf query) is created, packages will use this.
>
> Examples are mail-transport-agent (port 25, SMTP service, packages exim,
> masqmail, postfix, postfix-tls, sendmail, ssmtp, zmailer, zmailer-ssl),
> ftp-server (port 21, FTP service, packages ftpd, proftpd, wu-ftpd) and
> ident-server (port 113, IDENT/auth service, packages midentd, oidentd,
> pidentd). Examples of a virtual package that packages provide but with which
> they do _not_ conflict is httpd, and that's most probably because it's not
> so uncommon to run several HTTP daemons on different ports (aside from 80).
>
> Now, the current issue is that the same thing should be done for the
> *fingerd packages. That's why I'm sending this to folks maintaining
> {c,e,f,x,}fingerd packages. Currently these packages either conflict with
> others, or use bits of update-inetd magic to set up its entry in
> /etc/inetd.conf that is often FUBAR, and SNAFUs people's inetd.conf entries.
>
> Since there's not much point in running a fingerd on a non-standard port (at
> least I haven't seen done anywhere, or a finger program that can query
> different ports), it would seem appropriate to make these packages provide
> and conflicts with a virtual package called `finger-server', i.e. add this
> to the control file:
>
> Provides: finger-server
> Conflicts: finger-server
>
> The virtual package should be added to the official Policy list of virtual
> packages, too.
>
> I can (and will, if allowed) do as many NMUs as necessary to get this done.
> Since it should be done in potato, too, I'm sending this to Richard to ask
> can I/we upload changed packages in frozen. We have one full week to do it,
> which should be enough (these packages aren't large in general, mostly about
> 15KB .debs, I think even the m68k build daemon can catch up with these in a
> day or two :), and I don't think there is any chance that anything RC would
> break because of those two changes in these packages.
>
> How about it, then?
The same should probably be done for every package which installs daemons
which listen on a well known port.
--
Massimo Dal Zotto
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