Bug#780403: debian-policy: Define what should happen when installing a package and the init script fails to start it
Package: debian-policy
Severity: wishlist
What should happen if installing a package and then when it tries to start
its service it fails?
Currently the most common behaviour seems to be that the installation fails.
But is that the best outcome?
What if the sysadmin has a reverse proxy listening on port 80 and then
decides to install Apache or Nginx?
The init script fails until it changes the port to 8080 for example, but
shouldn't the package just install fine anyway?
It could be said that a failure to startup is not a failure to install; the
package is installed fine but configured wrong.
What if one wants to install Nginx as a frontend to static files and delegate
dynamic pages to Apache?
Maybe for the sake of flexibility and not so standard setups, init script
failure could be defined to not cause install failure.
For example, change this in postinst:
invoke-rc.d <service> start || exit $?
to this:
invoke-rc.d <service> start || true
See for example:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=779825
Thanks for considering!
Have a good day.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.0
APT prefers testing-updates
APT policy: (500, 'testing-updates'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=es_UY.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=es_UY.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
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