Bug#601455: Steps towards a patch to document disabling a daemon upon installation
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Sean Whitton writes:
>> 2. Do we need to include any text saying *why* the /etc/default practice
>> is a bad idea? I couldn't come up with a succinct way to state it.
>> In general, I think we can err on the side of not including the text,
>> since we have policy bugs that document the reasons.
> How about this text:
> Setting a value in /etc/default/PACKAGE is nowadays troublesome
> because supporting that pattern is very hard due to inflexibility in
> systemd, which is usually the default init system.
> This also makes it clear that this pattern is perfectly fine if for
> any reason the package does not support systemd.
I don't really agree with this -- I've disliked this approach (and there
were debian-devel threads against it) from long before systemd was
written. The explanation I'd give is that:
Setting a flag in /etc/default/PACKAGE hides from the init system
whether or not the daemon should actually be started, which leads to
inconsistent and confusing behavior: ``service <package> start`` may
return success but not start the service, services with a dependency
on this service will be started even though the service isn't running,
and init system status commands may incorrectly claim that the service
was started.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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