systemd: service was disabled by user, what should package's postinst do?

[Andreas Hasenack]

Hi,

I have a bug[1] on xenial where the user installed freeradius,
freeradius-ldap and then disabled the service:

systemctl stop freeradius.service
systemctl disable freeradius.service

When the freeradius packages are upgraded, freeradius-ldap's postinst fails
to force-reload the service, because it's not running:
freeradius.service is not active, cannot reload.
invoke-rc.d: initscript freeradius, action "force-reload" failed.
dpkg: error processing package freeradius-ldap (--configure):

In fact, even freeradius' postinst fails to start the service, but since
its start invocation ends with "|| true", the error is swallowed. But not
in the force-reload case:

freeradius.postinst:
         invoke-rc.d freeradius $action || true


freeradius-ldap.postinst:
          invoke-rc.d freeradius force-reload

A trivial workaround would be to add "|| true" to the force-reload line, of
course. But even the one around "start" feels bad, because it could mask
real errors.

What should be done here, from a policy perspective? Is there a better
pattern out there for this scenario already in some package, or even a
debhelper helper?

Thanks



1. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/freeradius/+bug/1712817
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