On Thursday, 02.04.2009 at 10:12 -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > At the risk of starting a holy war, and kind of highjaking, > > shouldn't Debian *not* start just-installed daemons by default? Or > > at least ask while installing if such daemon is to be started > > automatically (like sshd does, i think)? > > The argument is that if the user did not want the daemon started, > they would not have installed the package. And while there can be a > debconf question about it starting, the questions should be of low > priority (I insatlled the package, didn't I? why ask me over and over > whether I really really want it running?), and the default should be > yes.
It's not always clear. Sometimes, you don't know until
post-installation that a package includes a daemon at all.
> This is why Debian has debconf -- so that any critical configuration
> should be done at install, and there should be reasonable,
> non-obnoxious defaults set by the package anyway.
Well, that's also unclear. Running a daemon with defaults is not always
desired, and may in fact cause problems.
I must admit that I like the OpenBSD approach here. Installing a
package just installs the binaries. At the end of the installation, it
says something like:
To make the daemon start at each boot, add the following to
/etc/rc.local:
if [ -x /usr/local/sbin/somedaemon ]; then
/usr/local/sbin/somedaemon
fi
This may be a less convenient approach, but it does meet the criterion
of Least Surprise: a daemon won't be started automatically before you
have a chance to configure it, for example.
Dave.
--
Dave Ewart
da...@ceu.ox.ac.uk
Computing Manager, Cancer Epidemiology Unit
University of Oxford / Cancer Research UK
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