Re: update-rc.d

[David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org>]

Miguel Alvarez Blanco <miguel@carbono.quimica.uniovi.es> writes:

> a) if the sysadmin wants to fiddle with the links, he may do so
> (presumably by hand?) and the packaging system will not touch them
> *provided the sysadmin leaves at least one of the links*. Now, I can
> see how to use this to remove all but an unreachable link (i.e., a
> K99ipmasq link in an unused runlevel) so that the system does not
> touch them, but I do think that it is very ugly, tricking the system
> and not fixing it.

You probably want the service to stop on shutdown if it's running,
right?  Then leaving /etc/rc0.d/K99ipmasq and /etc/rc6.d/K99/ipmasq is
consistent with what you want, and still lets update-rc.d believe the
package is "installed".

IMHO the Debian system makes a lot of sense here, though it's not
perfect.  Everybody knows how to use 'rm' and 'ln -s', and publishing
those as The Official Way To Tweak Runlevels makes things easy for
sysadmins; I don't know how to use update-rc.d (or, on RH, chkconfig)
without reading the man page.  OTOH, it does kind of seem like it'd be
nice to be do things like easily configure a package to never start a
service ('rm /etc/rc?.d/S??service') or recreate the symlinks at the
right sequence number; I know RH's chkconfig can do the last one.
Probably a good opportunity to write code to fix the UI problem and
submit it as a wishlist bug against sysvinit.  :-)

> b) update-rc.d will remove its links if requested and the script is
> not there (well, or if -f is used as I do), if its first argument is
> purge, so that the user has requested the configuration to be
> removed.

That invocation is intended for the *package* to request that the
configuration be removed.

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell