[debhelper-devel] Bug#766194: debhelper: dh_installinit should gain option to ignore start failures

[Sam Hartman]

package: debhelper
version: 9.20141003 
severity: wishlist

I suspect a lot of folks will be writing  systemd service units in the
future.
While writing units for krb5-kdc, I ran across an issue.

On first install, until you set up your database, it's kind of expected
that krb5-kdc will fail to start.
Systemd is a lot more careful about noticing this than sysvinit, and
gives significantly less flexibility for hiding the error.

I'd really like to say that errors starting krb5-kdc on install or
upgrade should not break the installation run, but errors stopping it in
prerm should.

I can do that using the --error-handler parameter to dh_installinit.
That means I need to actually create an error handler in my prerm and
postinst.
I think this situation is going to be common enough that I want such an
error handler available with a command line option to dh_installinit.

Or perhaps we should decide that ignoring stop errors on upgrade or
uninstall is OK and I can just do --error-handler=true?

Thoughts welcome.

--Sam