Bug#801065: Section 6.4 - discourage failing install or upgrade when service fails to start

[Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org>]

On Mon, Oct 05, 2015 at 03:20:34PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> writes:
> >>>>>> "Marvin" == Marvin Renich <mrvn@renich.org> writes:
> 
> >     Marvin> As discussed on debian-devel starting at [1], I would like a
> >     Marvin> comment added to Section 6.4 "Best practices for maintainer
> >     Marvin> scripts" that recommends preventing the postinst script from
> >     Marvin> returning failure when a service fails to start.
> 
> > I strongly support this practice.
> 
> I'm also in favor.  However, this is a very substantial change to Debian
> practice, and I'm not sure what process should be used for making this
> kind of decision.  This wasn't a gap in our specification; rather, the
> previous standard was explicitly chosen (by at least some folks).  Failure
> to install was intentional and believed better since it didn't hide
> service failures.

But it had the major drawback that you could not fix the issue when the fix
required to install more packages, which is common.

So I am also in favor.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.