Package: dpkg Version: 1.10.9 Severity: wishlist It would be nice to have for example environment variables that would allow the administrator to control the behaviour of the postinst scripts. I know this is not entirely dpkg's business, but it would be quite hard to send this request to all packages containing daemons.
There are several daemon packages that when installed are not intended to be run until configured (like apache, sendmail, snmpd, sshd etc). The postinst scripts nonetheless start these daemons after installation, which in some cases can cause problems (like when you don't have a www-data user on the system and want Apache2 to save a new configuration). It would be easier if one could set something like DPKG_DONT_START=1 before running dpkg or apt and not get this problem. There are naturally other instructions, too, like DPKG_DONT_STOP=1 so that if the admin is updating lots of packages with apt, the script could fail if it really needs to stop/restart the daemon, or better yet, just do its job and not restart. Of course it would output a warning stating that the daemon has not been updated. There may be others too, and I know it will take time until all the packages would have this kind of checks in their scripts. But I think this would help the administrators in their jobs. -- System Information Debian Release: testing/unstable Kernel Version: Linux mauri 2.4.20-xfs #1 Tue Dec 10 19:05:17 EET 2002 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux Versions of the packages dpkg depends on: ii dselect 1.10.9 a user tool to manage Debian packages ii libc6 2.3.1-10 GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone
