On Wed, 04 Jul 2012 23:00:53 +0200 Paul Menzel <pm.deb...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Am Mittwoch, den 04.07.2012, 21:33 +0100 schrieb Roger Leigh: > > On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 10:17:10PM +0200, Paul Menzel wrote: > > > Does the manual need updating? > > > > No, I think the manual is correct and update-rc.d is not behaving as > > documented. > > I wonder though, what is the disadvantage of leaving `/etc/init.d/name` > behind and `-f` has to be used to do so?
The documented behavior is important if two packages provide a service of the same name. For example, the packages "ntp" and "ntpsec" both provide a service called "ntp". (I am the maintainer of ntpsec.) A user hit this in bug #901439: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=901439 Consider this series of steps: 1) apt install ntp 2) apt install ntpsec 3) apt purge ntp Step 1 creates /etc/init.d/ntp and the symlinks. Step 2 results in the ntp package being removed, and ntpsec's /etc/init.d/ntp installed instead. Step 3 results in ntp's postrm script, by way of the standard dh_installinit snippet, calling `update-rc.d ntp remove`. Expected results: /etc/rc*.d/*ntp symlinks are left alone. Actual results: /etc/rc*.d/*ntp symlinks are deleted. Purging ntp after installing ntpsec seems to be fairly common with users. Accordingly, I'm raising the severity of this bug to important. I would mark it serious, but I can't currently point to an explicit policy item being violated nor am I the maintainer of this package (nor a release manager). The same thing happens, for the exact same reasons, if you start with ntpsec, install ntp, then purge ntpsec. -- Richard
