Restarting services

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 9/25/06, Vasil Dimov <vd at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 11:47:46AM +0200, Erwin Van de Velde wrote:
> > On Monday 25 September 2006 11:26, Vasil Dimov wrote:
> > > IMHO in this case the administrator should be changed,
> > > not the way ports operate. Building idiot-proof system is impossible and
> > > leads to the:
> > >
> > > Shaw's Principle:
> > >         Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will
> > > want to use it.
> >
> > This is not about being idiot-proof but being handy to use. It also reduces
> > service downtime by immediately restarting the service after update instead
> > of waiting for the administrator to restart it.
>
> I think that implementing this feature the right way would be too
> complex and would bring too little benefit. By "right way" I mean that
> a given service should be started upon installation only if it was
> actually stopped during the upgrade process.
>
> Ofcourse if someone thinks that it is worth implementing I would be
> happy to be asked
> "service xyz was stopped during upgrade, do you want to start it now?" [y]
>
> One could always minimize downtime by doing
> portupgrade xyz && /usr/local/etc/rc.d/xyz start

Our ports system does not have a notion of upgrade action. We'll
be discussing this later this year. The problem is acknowledged,
but the only current guideline is not to stop a service at deinstall,
unless it's really necessary. Many maintainers follow this rule.