Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>]

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On Thu, 18 Aug 2005, David Brown wrote:
> I mentioned the patches we do to the udev spell to linux-hotplug-devel
> and he mentioned some things of importance. I mentioned why the patch
> was needed in several parts...
> This is what he said about removing the killall udevd call that we
> patch out of the makefile.
>
> <snip>
> > 1) no package to start or stop services in the process of installing
> > the package... hence the removal of the killall udevd && udevd
> > --daemon call
>
> So you install a new version of udev and don't kill the old udevd
> program?  That's not good at all.  Remember, if you set DEST_DIR, that
> doesn't get called.  That is there to allow you to build and not mess
> with any running services (as is needed on rpm and deb build machines.)
> </snip>
>
> I was wondering what our official position is on starting and stopping
> critical services on spell upgrades...

We used to start/stop/restart services when their package was updated,
but this lead to problems, mainly due to config files changing (e.g.
exim, postgresql, etc.) so the service wouldn't start and the user
could be left scratching his/her head on why their mail server stopped
responding.

Service stops/starts/restarts should /only/ occur at the admin's
request, not at any other time.

However, udev is not a 'service' per se as telinit does not work with
udev (nor devfsd, IIRC). Perhaps such items should be restarted?

- -sandalle

- --
Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us                  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/  #196285  |  http://www.shock.wsu.edu/
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