Your message dated Wed, 17 Apr 2019 21:41:45 +0200 with message-id <84d404a6642454b541550ec53c908...@debian.org> and subject line Re: Bug#904558: What should happen when maintscripts fail to restart a service has caused the Debian Bug report #904558, regarding What should happen when maintscripts fail to restart a service to be marked as done.
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--- Begin Message ---Package: tech-ctte X-debbugs-cc: debian-pol...@lists.debian.org 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 Whittonsignature.asc
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--- Begin Message ---Apologies for the long delay.We discussed this issue in several TC meetings without being able to makereal progress. After several rounds of discussions we came to the conclusion that thereason why we can't make progress is that we always end up hitting the wall of "The Technical Committee does not engage in design of new proposals and policies". While we recognize that this is a problem worth fixing, this is not something that we can fix as a body and need the help of the Developersto do it. On the one hand, maintainers want to be able to notify sysadmins whenthings don't go as expected. On the other hand, sysadmins don't want their systems to be left in weird/broken states because one single thing didn'tgo as expected. A failing maintscript is a horrible way of notifying sysadmins, but it's the only one available up to now and so package maintainers use it when they think the failure is critical enough.So, the TC declines to rule on what should maintscripts do when failing to(re)start a service (or otherwise encountering a similarly serious problem).Instead, we recommend that a work group of developers is formed, to create a better mechanism of notification that can be used to let sysadmins knowwhen things don't go as expected on their systems, without leaving themachines in weird/broken states. Given that this is a problem faced by many Linux distributions, it would be nice if this mechanism was developed and published in a non Debian specific way that made it also available for otherdistributions to use. Once that mechanism exists, we would strongly recommend that almost all failures use this mechanism, instead of failing maintscripts. -- Marga, on behalf of the Technical Committee
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