Bug#825394: Bug#824931: similar to bug #824931

[Marc Lehmann]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2016 at 04:37:32PM +0200, Marco d'Itri <md at Linux.IT> wrote:
> While I still think that this would be the most generally useful 
> semantics for other inetd-started daemons, I can see how it could 
> surprise telnet/rsh users.

It surely also suprises ftp users, samba users and users of other
services. I am not sure why you keep ignoring those and single out telnet
or rsh/rlogin? There is nothing special about rsh - all openbsd-inetd
services are affected the same way.

> Since I am not sure if there is a simple solution that could be 
> implemented in the telnetd package, at this point I am considering to 
> set KillMode=process as the default for openbsd-inetd.

It should be obvious that behaviour that is decades old and didn't suffer
from any obvious problems shouldn't be changed without a good reason,
which is the case for both bugs. Arguably, the systemd change has a better
rationale than the openbsd-inetd change.

So the mode that most closely resembles to what inetd has always done
should be the default unless there is reason to change.

This is especially true for "old" services - the older a service is, the
better the reason must be to break it. If a maintainer thinks breaking
stuff is ok just because he likes the new behaviour he/she is doing a bad
job.

> OTOH, I am not sure that this use (corner) case of telnet/rsh users is 
> more important than the others, even if the current default is 
> a regression for them, so I am still undecided...

A shame, really. In the absence of any good reason for a change, a change
shouldn't be done. If it breaks stuff, it should be undone.

In any case, it doesn't affect me anymore, because I already made the
transition to rlinetd, which doesn't have this bug, even if it cost me one
production box which had to be rebooted because openbsd-inetd killed all
kinds of system services when I installed rlinetd (because oßpenbsd killed
them and the apt-get process doing the rlinetd installation).

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