Package: debian-policy Severity: wishlist I have installed ikiwiki and configured it sometime ago. I removed its package recently but did not purge it.... I got noisy cron error messages. If the cron script was written in the way most other packages checking the existence of the executable, this did not happen. I do not know where were the original cause (my error?) but this let me look into the policy :-)
Some parts of the rules described under "9.3.2 Writing the scripts" http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s-writing-init for init scripts such as the requirement to check the existence of executables before their execution *must* be applied also to any automatically starting scripts provided as conffile. Example of such conffiles of automatically starting scripts provided as a part of a package are: * init scripts * cron scripts * power control scripts * pluggable device control scripts * ... Also, this rule for the automatically starting scripts should also be applied to ones generated by the package configuration helper. Such helper *should* generate scripts with the same care. This prevents un-needed error log after the package removal without purging. In this respect, inserting a section just before 9.3 as new 9.3 "Writing the automatic scripts" while copying most of the 9.3.2 contents except for the parts of the start, stop, restart, and force-reload options while mentioning "The following rules for automatically starting scripts provided as conffile must be followed." at the top or something similar, will be a good idea. The old "9.3.2 Writing the scripts" and old "9.5 Cron jobs" should be updated to point to additional requirement for such scripts. Osamu -- System Information: Debian Release: 7.0 APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (10, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 3.7-trunk-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
