Bug#438779: boinc-client: update of package should not start new version automatically

[Frank S. Thomas]

On Sunday 19 August 2007 18:40, Steffen Moeller wrote:
> The szenario that I just ran into was that I had donated
> a colleague the machine for his computations, /etc/init.d/boind stopped
> for that and then did apt-get -u dist-upgrade. Boinc-client was started
> but I should have asked at least.

It is reasonable to ask for that a service is not started during a system 
upgrade or boot if this is desired. This should be possible for all services, 
not just BOINC because it runs CPU intensive applications and therefore has a 
special impact on the system. The way how boinc-client's init script is 
installed and integrated into the init system is the default way in Debian 
(via dh_installinit), therefore I don't think changing solely boinc-client's 
maintainer scripts is the right way to address this issue.

In a previous mail to this bug report I advised to set ENABLED="0" in 
/etc/default/boinc-client after running "/etc/init.d/boinc stop" to disable 
the init script completely. This has the desired effect that BOINC is not 
started during an upgrade or boot, but it has the disadvantage that you can't 
use the init script without editing /etc/default/boinc-client before. In the 
meantime I learned in this thread [1] that the standard way how to disable 
services (not restarting them on upgrades nor starting them at boot) is to 
change the the S symlinks in /etc/rc?.d/ to K symlinks (so changing 
/etc/rc?.d/S20boinc-client to /etc/rc?.d/K20boinc-client). This has the 
desired effect of not restarting BOINC on upgrades and still let you start and 
stop it via /etc/init.d/boinc-client.

There is a tool called sysv-rc-conf which renames the symlinks for you. So to 
disable the BOINC client you can run:

  sysv-rc-conf boinc-client off

I think this is what you should have done in the first place before running  
"/etc/init.d/boinc stop" and giving the machine to your colleague. This way 
the boinc-client wouldn't have bugged you during the dist-upgrade.

What do you think? Can we close this bug or should boinc-client really behave 
differently than other services?

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/07/msg00892.html

Cheers,
-- 
Frank S. Thomas <fst at debian.org>           PGP public key ID: 0xDC426429
Debian Developer                            finger fst/key at db.debian.org
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