[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#545448: invoke-rc.d should indicate whats wrong when not starting services

[Patrick Schoenfeld]

On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 11:26:38AM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Patrick Schoenfeld]
> > recently I stumbled across some behaviour in invoke-rc.d which I
> > consider somehow broken. When trying to start a service with
> > invoke-rc.d it sometimes refuses to start the service, without a
> > notice whats wrong. Of course not starting services under some
> > circumstances is OK, but not telling the user whats wrong isn't.
> 
> When does this happen?  How can we reproduce it?  Currently your
> request is to vague for me to know what do adress. :)

Good question. If the program had proper diagnostic messages
in the first place, it would be easier to answer. What I had,
where it happened, is an LSB header like this in the init script:

# Default-Start:  3 5
# Default-Stop:   0 1 2 6

System was in runlevel 2, so this script probably did not
start because of the wrong runlevel. Script was installed
with update-rc.d defaults.

The output of invoke-rc.d was simply nothing. RC = 0.
Starting it with --disclose-deny yields into rc 101. Thats
something to start with, but actually not very much.

Basically the behaviour is similar as described in the
already existing bug reports, with the description that
invoke-rc.d simply does not start something, like
#452119 or #385593. BTW. the first has the sh -x output
attached which you asked for.

Best Regards,
Patrick