Bug#780403: debian-policy: Define what should happen when installing a package and the init script fails to start it

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

    Russ> Ivan Baldo <ibaldo@adinet.com.uy> writes:
    >> 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?

    Russ> Currently, Policy leaves this to the discretion of the package
    Russ> maintainer.  To change that, what will be needed here is not
    Russ> just an argument that other behaviors besides failing
    Russ> installation might be desirable, but that there is a
    Russ> compelling need to standardize this behavior across the entire
    Russ> archive instead of leaving it to the discretion of the
    Russ> maintainer.

I find this issue tends to come up a lot more than it used to.  The
issue is that systemd units tend to track a lot more errors than init
scripts.  So, in Jessie, there tend to be a lot more cases where a
package will fail to install under the same situations where in wheezy
it'd install fine.  The problem is made more complex by debhelper, which
makes it somewhat annoying (especially in dh 7 mode) to express this
maintainer preference.  So, you have a lot of dh7 packages that suddenly
got much more picky because people created service units.

--Sam