bad practice: services that are automatically re-enabled

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 07:53:07PM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
> Why "--del" should be different from "off"? In either case, the package
> should not change the state of the service, period. It's not like
> something goes off every once in a blue moon and changes things around -
> if there's a change, most likely someone made a decision and did it for
> a reason. The software should respect that decision.

Because "del" removes the state information completely. Then, when the
package is updated, it has no idea if it was supposed to be on or off, and
has to go with the default. And the default for some of these things
(syslog, say) *should* be "on".

> Almost always, it's preferable to disable services with "--del",
> therefore keeping the list shorter and easier to read for the overworked
> sysadmin. It's kind of hard to scan tons of chkconfig lists on many
> systems, trying to figure out which ones are on and which are off; those
> lists are not easy to read at a glance.

chkconfig --list|grep [35]:on


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
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