Bug#941194: initscripts: remove some implementation details
Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> writes:
> On Thu 26 Sep 2019 at 09:01AM +02, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
>> Control: reassign -1 debian-policy
>>
>> The section on initscripts has too much implementation details about
>> /etc/rcn.d; these are better explained by external documentation.
> Are you saying that they are *currently* better explained by actually
> existing external documentation, or that it would be better to have them
> explained by external documentation instead of the Policy Manual? If
> the former, could you point to that documentation, please?
I agree with removing the discussion of the symlink forest and how it is
managed. We require use of update-rc.d and prohibits mucking about with
the symlinks. Given that, I think the symlink forest is an implementation
detail of sysv-rc and we should remove the detailed documentation of it
from Policy and keep only the requirement to use update-rc.d and the
details required to invoke it correctly (which includes some discussion of
run levels).
I'm hesitant to remove all discussion of run levels because package
maintainers are still responsible for choosing a run level at which to
start their service and providing that run level as an argument to
update-rc.d. I think Policy should include enough details to allow
package maintainers to make that decision. That said, the current text
doesn't include any useful advice, so I'm okay with removing what
discussion there currently is and then reintroducing some better
documentation later when someone gets a chance to write it.
>> Also the rationale for why `DISABLED=yes` (or similar) fits better
>> into a footnote than the main text (IMHO).
> I'm inclined to agree with you, but since Russ is keen to reduce the
> number of footnotes in Policy, it would be good to hear from him here.
I don't like footnotes; if something is important enough to say, I think
it's usually important enough to put into the main text without making
people click or jump around to find it. But I think the current paragraph
in Policy is poorly worded and not as general or as straightforward as it
could be, and it's weirdly out of place in the update-rc.d section.
How about, rather than moving it to a footnote, rephrasing it as follows?
Except when the package has been removed but not purged, as described
above, the ``/etc/init.d`` script should not decide whether or not to
start the daemon based on configuration settings (such as settings in
``/etc/default``) or silently exit successfully when the daemon could
not be started. This causes inconsistent and confusing behavior such
as ``service <package> start`` returning success but not starting the
service; services with a dependency on this service starting even
though the service isn’t running; and init system status commands
claiming that the service was started. If the ``/etc/init.d`` script
is invoked with the ``start`` or ``restart`` arguments and the service
could not or should not be started, it should produce an appropriate
error message and exit with a non-zero status.
and then moving this whole paragraph into 9.3.2, probably as the
second-to-last paragraph?
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: