Debian Bug report logs - #904558
What should happen when maintscripts fail to restart a service

Package: tech-ctte; Maintainer for tech-ctte is Technical Committee <[email protected]>;

Reported by: Sean Whitton <[email protected]>

Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2018 04:12:02 UTC

Severity: normal

Done: Margarita Manterola <[email protected]>

Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.

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Subject: Bug#904558: What should happen when maintscripts fail to restart a service
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From: Ian Jackson <[email protected]>
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Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2018 12:25:22 +0100
To: Wouter Verhelst <[email protected]>
Cc: Simon McVittie <[email protected]>,
    [email protected],
    Margarita Manterola <[email protected]>,
    Sean Whitton <[email protected]>,
    Tollef Fog Heen <[email protected]>,
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Wouter Verhelst writes ("Re: Bug#904558: What should happen when maintscripts fail to restart a service"):
> Perhaps the error handler should also be configurable by policy-rc.d, as
> I hinted to before.

I think this is a key point.  We do not have to make a single decision
which everyone has to be happy with.  We can instead continue to be
all things to all people.

I think the best answer would be:

 * Individual maintainers decide for themselves whether to treat
   service (re)start failure as postinst failure, based on their own
   perception; maintainers may make different decisions for different
   init systems.

 * If the maintainer has no particular reason to diverge the right
   answer is usually to fail the postinst with init systems that do
   not provide service supervision; but to not fail the postinst with
   ones that do.  (I think from earlier messages that this is how the
   default implementations already work.)

 * The administrator should be able to override this policy question
   globally for the whole system, or on a per-package basis.

This is probably a manageable amount of actual work: the prescription
for individual package sis roughly what they do right now.

The support for configuration in something like policy-rc.d has a few
design decisions to be made but doesn't seem really difficult.  Also
nothing blocks on it.  The TC would simply be saying "this would be a
good thing to have".

Ian.

-- 
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