[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Pkg-mailman commit - rev 741 - trunk/debian

[Thijs Kinkhorst]

On Thu, August 15, 2013 16:52, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Aug 2013, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
>
>> Thinking a bit more about this. It seems weird that we exit 0 when a
>> site
>> list does not exist. Afterall, the daemon is not started so the init
>> script should actually be failing, right?
>
> No, absolutely not. I actually read about that when writing an init
> script for JBoss internally at $workplace recently, and Policy says
> that initscripts should fail gracefully in order to not break either
> boot nor package installation/uninstallation (which normally starts
> and shuts down the service).

Installation/uninstallation would not be broken, because the user would
have been asked for the necessary info via debconf and the site list would
have been created, so the init script doesn't fail.

If the admin actually removes the site list and then dpkg-configures,
indeed, it will fail. But e.g. Apache dpkg-configure will also fail if you
introduce a config error in the scripts.

Can you point me to the relevant Policy remarks? I just read 9.3 and
didn't find something that indicates that init scripts should not fail
when the service they're trying to start didn't start.


Thijs