Comment 25 for bug 56426

Joseph.

You seem to have conveniently forgetten the other link I posted, so I'll post it again.

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html

This is the debian policy on how daemons should work. "start" for starting, "stop" for stopping and update-rc.d for enabling and disabling.

By the way, I had a look at your list of packages that do similar things. Most are not installed on my machine so I installed portmap. It's initscript always obeys a start command, there's no if $START_DAEMON. Some others _do_ do what you say. I'm not sure how you came up with that list of packages.

Just because there are other scripts out that don't follow the standard doesn't make it right. In the case of avahi-daemon actually be some justification for it since apparently avahi needs to be started by dbus and dbus is not compatible with /etc/init.d, however this piece of info has only very recently been mentioned. In the case of mdadm or fetchmail, there appears to be no such reason.