bad practice: services that are automatically re-enabled

[Florin Andrei]

Something that absolutely needs to be fixed in future FC versions is
services that "misteriously" re-enable themselves.

I'm sure it happened to everyone, so my story is surely not news.
I install a fresh system, remove unnecessary packages, disable services
that are not used at the moment but will be used after a while. All is
good and the system is doing exactly what's supposed to do.
But when I verify with chkconfig the list of enabled services a few
weeks after that... surprise! Many services somehow managed to re-enable
themselves!

I suspect there are two causes:
1. When updating certain packages, the service will mark itself enabled,
regardless of the current status. That is disgusting. This practice must
stop immediately.
2. I think there are certain weekly or monthly crontabs or something
like that that have a nasty habit of thinking themselves smarter than
the sysadmin and make their own decisions of re-enabling services that
were knowingly disabled by the aforementioned sysadmin. This sneaky,
surreptitious, nasty habit must disappear.

Any script, any piece of software, whatever, should not blindingly re-
enable services. The current status of the service (enabled / disabled)
should be checked and the script/software/whatever should not change it.

This goes for the Fedora Core components proper, the Extras, and all the
other independent repositories as well.
There should be some guidelines or a policy for building RPM packages
that contain system services, or daemons, whatever, with regard to
actions taken during install, update and periodic cron jobs - all things
that might change the enabled/disabled status of a service.

Anyway, I will be very happy to follow said policy, since myself I'm
guilty of building RPM packages that do stupid things with chkconfig. I
hereby repent and publicly admit my sinful ways, and I ask everyone to
work together and come up with a clear, better way of dealing with this
class of problems.
Otherwise... you know, software that thinks itself smarter than its
users - that's so Microsoft.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/