On 2012-06-02 08:25:40 -0600 (-0600), Aaron Toponce wrote:
[...]
> I don't understand why services _should_ be started by default
> post-install.
[...]
There are many desktop-oriented home networking applications (file
and printer sharing, media distribution, et cetera) which really do
need to be started upon installation. The average desktop user is
going to expect them to "just work" when installed, and probably
doesn't even grok the concept of a socket listener much less
understand why it would need to be "started" before it works.
On a server with a competent system administrator, there's someone
who understands that a service needs to be configured and started.
On the other hand, that same administrator can protect their systems
from compromise through an automatically-started-but-mostly-secure
default configured network service (local packet filters, selinux
policies, network firewall devices, out-of-band/offline
upgrades...).
It may not be a popular opinion, but I'm personally quite a fan of
the maintainers who compromise by providing a package with the
daemon and then one or more separate packages with init system
bindings/scripts. That way you can install *just* the software,
configure it, then install a second package which causes it to run
by default. And if someone wants it to run automatically, they can
just install the init binding package which depends on the
corresponding daemon package. Seems elegant to me, admittedly at the
expense of increasing the size of the package database with teensy
init-oriented packages (but really, are the majority of Debian's
packages network daemons anyway?).
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