Hi, thanks for keeping up the discussion! While I did suggest to file this against dpkg initially, after reading this bug I do agree with Guillem that src:dpkg is the wrong place to implement this. Dpkg should care about .deb files and .deb files only (and whatever is needed around this). I therefor propose to reassign this discussion to either "general" or "debian-policy" for now.
That said, back to the original topic. I agree with Patrick that we need a flexble way to tell "the system" whether we want to start a specific service on installation or not. The mentioned policy-rc.d system may help here, but is not in the current state of documentation and implementation. As far as I can find (according to [1]), our own documentation mentions policy-rc.d only twice: [2] and [3]. Especially it is not mentioned in Policy 9.3.3 [7]! The best documentation I could find is on people.d.o and in the sysv-rc package: [4], which could make one think this is not an official interface and only applies to SysV init (it does not: [8]). So the first step to fixing the issue should be promoting parts of [4] to the Debian Policy, making policy-rc.d an actual interface definition. After this is defined, we should have a look at the archive and the present mis-implementations of [4]. A quick search reveals three "correct" uses: [5] and various "maybe-not-so-correct" (I did not read the whole code of the packages) ones: [6]. [ "correct" means here the package installs an own policy script using the alternatives system ]. With a policy in place and a policy-conform archive, we then can provide a default implementation of the interface to the users (as a high-priority alternative inside of pkg:init-system-helpers?) in which they can decide whether they do want the default debian policy or whether they want all or some services to be skipped during the installation. A naïve implementation can be found in __DATA__. With this implementation, Patrick will just have to drop an /etc/policy-rc.d/<clusterservice> with a content of "DEBIAN_NO_START_SERVICES=1" and then his specific service will not be started during installation. Neither it will be restarted during upgrade, which is the right thing to do in Patrick's setup. Also, this should be the real interface Patrick is looking for. Thanks for reading thus far o/ Evgeni [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=policy-rc.d+site%3Adebian.org [2] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ch3.en.html#s3.5 [3] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch09.en.html#_chroot_system [4] https://people.debian.org/~hmh/invokerc.d-policyrc.d-specification.txt installed on Debian systems as /usr/share/doc/sysv-rc/README.policy-rc.d.gz from pkg:sysv-rc [5] https://codesearch.debian.net/results/install%20%2Fusr%2Fsbin%2Fpolicy-rc.d/ [6] https://codesearch.debian.net/perpackage-results/exit.*policy-rc.d/ [7] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html [8] http://sources.debian.net/src/init-system-helpers/1.24/script/deb-systemd-invoke/#L63 __DATA__ #!/bin/sh # doc # either "echo DEBIAN_NO_START_SERVICES=1 > /etc/policy-rc.d.conf" # or "echo DEBIAN_NO_START_SERVICES=1 > /etc/policy-rc.d/$service" # or FORCE_NO_START_SERVICES=1 dpkg -i ... NAME=policy-rc.d DEBIAN_NO_START_SERVICES=0 # load system settings [ ! -f /etc/${NAME}.conf ] || source /etc/${NAME}.conf # load package specific settings [ ! -f /etc/${NAME}/$1 ] || source /etc/${NAME}/$1 if [ ${DEBIAN_NO_START_SERVICES} -eq 1 ] && [ -n "${DPKG_RUNNING_VERSION}" ]; then exit 101 elif [ -n "${FORCE_NO_START_SERVICES}" ]; then exit 101 else exit 104 fi -- Bruce Schneier can read and understand Perl programs.
