hi fergal, On Sat, 2006-12-02 at 04:51 +0000, Fergal Daly wrote: > The document above says that "start" should "start the service" but it > seems there are quite a few debian packages where this does not work > because their initscripts contain things like > > --- > test -f /etc/default/fetchmail || exit 0 > . /etc/default/fetchmail > if [ ! "x$START_DAEMON" = "xyes" ]; then > echo "Edit /etc/default/fetchmail to start fetchmail" > exit 0 > fi > --- > > I can see no point to this, it is a redundant second knob that needs in principle, i agree with you. i believe the rationale is that in many cases there's not a reasonable default configuration so the maintainer makes you jump through an extra hoop to make sure that you've configured it before it's ready to go. for example, spamassassin. however, i think that in such cases the package maintainer really ought to just ship the init script and not register it to start/stop at all, which makes much more sense in terms of policy's wording as well as the way things should be done with an init system. but, i'm not the one who's going to spend any time/energy on picking a fight with package maintainers about it :/ sean
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