Re: Servers going online automatically?
On Sunday, December 6, 2015 7:43 PM, Marc Haber <mh+debian-policy@zugschlus.de> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 05, 2015 at 08:27:56PM +0000, Vesa Paatero wrote:
>
> > Now, I am not expecting to get that policy changed just like that but
> > would it be a good idea to mandate some documentation, perhaps a
> > notification to the package description, for those packages that
> > expose such an interface to the world without user interaction?>
>
> How many of our _DEFAULTS_ do you expect us to document in all package
> descriptions affected by that _DEFAULT_?
I understand. But maybe documenting such "affecting defaults" could make sense if they were expressed as flags of some sort so that they wouldn't make the descriptions too long. For example, text "[SERVER]" at the bottom of the description could indicate that package establishes a server on your computer -- and then all those bracketed flags in use would be explained on some web page.
. . . Thinking further, that flags/tags would introduce an overlapping package categorization of sorts, and something like that seems to exist. But in this case it was maybe a different documentation aspect that drove the idea -- having explicit descriptions of what each categorizing tag or flag implies for the package and its usage.
> That being said, I'd like to plug
> http://blog.zugschlus.de/archives/974-Debians-Policy-rc.d-infrastructure-explained.html
> once more.
Thanks for the link. Even as you admit in the article that "it is a frequent beef against Debian that on Debian, network services get started immediately after the package was installed", maybe we should keep our antennas up for any useful ideas to make that default/policy more visible to those whom it otherwise would take by surprise.
. . . Admitted, it is generally a challenging problem to have the right piece of documentation show up at the right time and place for the audience that would benefit from it.
Reply to: