ports/162049: The Ports tree lacks a framework to restart services

[Stefan Ehmann]

On Thursday, October 27, 2011 11:15:00 AM Ed Schouten wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> As crees@ suggested, I'm sending an email to ports@ about this.
> 
> What really bothers me when I use the FreeBSD Ports tree on one of my
> systems, is that the behaviour of dealing with services is quite
> inconsistent. As mentioned in the PR:
> 
> - If I upgrade Apache, MySQL or PostgreSQL, it does not restart the
>   service, meaning it won't use the freshly installed daemon. This has
>   potential security issues.
> 
> - If I upgrade Dovecot, it shuts it down during the upgrade, but won't
>   restart it. This means that I have to watch portmaster to complete and
>   must not forget to restart Dovecot afterwards.
> 
> My question is whether anyone has ever attempted to improve the
> integration with rc-scripts? In the PR I propose something along these
> lines:
> 
> 	We know exactly which ports install rc scripts (USE_RC_SUBR).
> 	Why not run `/usr/local/etc/rc.d/${FOO} status' and
> 	`/usr/local/etc/rc.d/${FOO} stop' prior to installation. Based
> 	on the return value of the first, we can run
> 	`/usr/local/etc/rc.d/${FOO} start' after installation.

portupgrade provides basic support for restarting services via pkgtools.conf:

  BEFOREDEINSTALL = {
    # Automatically stop the service for each package that has a
    # rc script enabled
    '*' => proc { |origin|
      cmd_stop_rc(origin)
    },
  }

  AFTERINSTALL = {
    # Automatically start the server for each package that
    # installs a rc file enabled
    '*' => proc { |origin|
      cmd_start_rc(origin)
    },
  }


Keeping a service running during/after upgrade is potentielly unsafe. E.g., it 
might be looking for files that have just been removed or modified in an 
incompatible way.

Keeping a service running after deletion (no reinstall) also seems like a 
really bad idea to me.