Too many default services on

[Ville Skyttä]

On Monday 31 March 2008, Chris Ricker wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, John Dennis wrote:
> > My understanding is rpm's which install a service do *not* start the
> > service in %post via chkconfig for all the reasons cited in the thread
> > (i.e. the sys admin or owner decides what should be running, how it's
> > configured,e etc. merely installing an rpm should not start a hidden
> > service). There are a minority of exceptions, services which must run to
> > make the system usable, these are well known. It is permissible to
> > perform a condrestart in %post, but this is just respecting the existing
> > configuration on the box.
>
> AFAIK, there are no guidelines -- look through the wiki and see if you can
> find any?

I can't find any and I'm a bit surprised about that - I think there was a 
recommendation in the fedora.us guidelines that recommended "everything off 
unless there's a good reason for it to be on by default" which IMO is a good 
rule of thumb.

> I agree that what you're saying is what the standard should be, but other
> packagers' understanding appears to be something closer to "if it's a
> non-default package, install should enable since installing means you want
> it".

That understanding is not a very good one.  One may end up installing packages 
containing services without specifically asking for them, eg. through "yum 
groupinstall" or dependencies.