Subject: Bug#802501: init script failures during postinst and related scripts

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2015 12:24:22 -0400

>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Pocock <[email-masked]> writes:

I agree.
I think Henrique's advice is correct as far as it goes.
However as a distribution, I think we should explicitly encourage people
to consider the consequences on dist-upgrade and other operations.
For some daemons, where the system is likely to be totally broken,
having the installation break is probably the right answer.
If  the postinst is reasonably convinced that the problem is going to
make additional installation difficult (for example root partition or
/usr full) then failing also make sense.

However, for the vast majority of daemons, breaking installation is far
worse than a silent failure to restart.

I believe that this is a significant problem in Debian today andsystemd
makes this  a
significant regression of jessie over wheezy.
(Here I'm not saying systemd is bad; it does a better job of reporting
errors to postinst.; it just gives us behavior that sucks for our users)

--Sam