Subject: Bug#904558: What should happen when maintscripts fail to restart a service

From: Sean Whitton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2018 12:07:59 +0800

Package: tech-ctte
X-debbugs-cc: [email-masked]
Control: block 780403 by -1

I hereby request advice from the Technical Committee on a decision that
I must take in my role as a Debian Policy delegate.  To be completely
clear, I am not seeking a decision.  I refer to the third power of the
T.C. listed under section 6.1 of the Debian Constitution: "Any person or
body may ... seek advice from [the Technical Committee]."

In bugs #780403 and #802501 the following question has been asked (I
quote Daniel Pocock):

    If postinst or one of the other scripts does a service restart and
    the restart operation fails, should the postinst abort or should it
    mask the error, continue and return success?

At present the Policy Manual does not answer this question, and thus it
is left up to maintainer discretion: whatever the maintainer thinks
makes sense for the service in question.

Others have pointed out, however, that this means that users will see
inconsistent behaviour.  There is no practical way for a user to
determine what will happen when installing a given package that starts
or restarts a service, if that start or restart attempt fails.  So if it
were possible to come up with consistent answer to the question posed,
it would be useful to our users.

As a Policy delegate I want to move this issue along, and I can see
three ways of doing that:

1. write a patch to explicitly state in Policy that what happens when a
   service (re)start fails in a maintscript is left up to package
   maintainer discretion, and close the bugs

2. make a further attempt to establish consensus on a requirement that
   maintscripts are consistent in the case of a (re)start failure (this
   is the default option, so to speak, and I cannot see it succeeding)

3. ask the T.C. to decide what maintscripts should do in these cases.

The general question about which I am seeking advice: does the
T.C. think that Debian can be consistent on service (re)starts in
maintscripts, or is the best we can do to leave it up to package
maintainer discretion?

Thanks.

-- 
Sean Whitton