Bug#541872: debian-policy: identical notation for disabled-by-user and auto-generated entries in /etc/inetd.conf
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 01:43:47AM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote [edited]:
> I would really rather we went with the proposal I put forward in this
> thread:
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/03/msg00496.html
>
> in this message:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/03/msg00573.html
Sorry too many downsides:
- too disruptive, too much work
- how are you going to keep track of user-policy along the lines of "I don't
want ftp enabled no matter what packages are installed in the future"?
- you'll have to re-implement update-inetd from scratch, except that now the
functionality will be spread all over the place
- you need to ship fragments for every supported format
Having read several criticisms of update-inetd, I still think that we're
better off fixing it than starting from scratch (please don't spend any time
trying to convince me otherwise; if you feel like it, let's discuss how to fix
it's problems than hypothetical alternative approaches).
update-inetd has many open bugs:
- it _is_ actually buggy (most notably #510406)
- the documentation is not in-your-face explicit about user-disabled entries
being preceded with only one '#'; '##' won't do, '# ' or anything else won't
do either
- policy doesn't help (hence this bug) and it's silent on how update-inetd
should deal with service entries that are commented out with neither '#' nor
'#<off>#' (how about adding a lintian warning for these cases?)
- perhaps due to policy and the --comment-chars misfeature, maintainer scripts
might not always do the right thing (meaning, never disable a service with
anything but the default comment-chars)
-S
--
debtags-organised WNPP bugs: http://members.hellug.gr/serzan/wnpp
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