bad practice: services that are automatically re-enabled

[Florin Andrei]

On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 22:20 -0400, John Thacker wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 10:08:19PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Did you run:
> >  chkconfig --del <service> (wrong)
> > or
> >  chkconfig --level <levels> <service> (right)
> > ?
> 
> chkconfig <service> off
> will also work.  It *is* somewhat confusing, though.  It's a mistake I
> made when first using chkconfig; then I saw the problem mentioned, and
> bothered to actually read the man page more closely. ;)

I think that is actually the problem.

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.

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.
Yes, I know the service is there, yes, I know I can re-enable it later
on, I just want it out of the way for the moment. Packages should not
ignore my decision.

Any way I look at it, I fail to see the reason why "--del" should imply
some kind of weaker decision that "off". If anything, it should be a
stronger statement.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/