Comment 18 for bug 1152764

Fred,

As Lenin once said, "Marxism is not a dogma, but a recipe". I think it is fully applicable to Debian init scripts policy. If the recipe does not cover your use case, you have to find a way that does. I think the guy (who said that you didn't understand Debian) was rightfully alarmed that you were going to introduce a non-standard way to pass parameters to daemons which the Debian user is not supposed to be used to. What he didn't understand was that mysqld is not a exactly a standard OS daemon (and MySQL DBA is not exactly a Debian user), and a cluster node process is even less so - that is, sometimes the DBA needs to start it manually, and pass it parameters, just like the regular program.

Also, being able to pass command line parameters to init script does not invalidate other, "standard", ways to configure mysqld daemon in Debian, so you're a not really breaking any rules by supporting an additional way, so it can't be a serious objection. I suppose the guy was just trying to "educate" you about the standard Debian ways being unaware that those are not enough.

Generally not being able to pass arbitrary command line options to mysqld in init script invocation can be a serious pain in the ass so I'd wholeheartedly advise to leave that opportunity in debian init script - at least for the sake of compatibility with RHEL/CentOS. However once you support passing the parameters, the need for dedicated command kinda falls off.

As for the command name, finding a good one is paramount since it stays forever ;) Again, with Henrik's proposal we see

# service mysql cluster-start

which is kinda confusing (which cluster is meant here? MySQL Cluster?). Wouldn't it make sense to rename the whole service as 'pxc' in that case? Or this one:

# service mysql bootstrap-pxc

?