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/ -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
