Bug#780403: debian-policy: Define what should happen when installing a package and the init script fails to start it
On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 02:51:11PM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> >>>>> "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.
In general, packages maintainer scripts should not fail without a compelling
reason.
A package installation failure leaves the packaging system in a state where it
is much harder to recover from problems.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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