Comment 2 for bug 119454

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and help to improve Ubuntu.

The behavior of debhelper here is correct; any init script which exits non-zero when trying to stop a daemon that isn't running is buggy and should be fixed. This will be clarified in an upcoming update to Debian policy, on which Ubuntu's packaging policy is based; however, this is not a change to the intent of policy, which has always been that init scripts not fail when called to stop an already-stopped process.

Note that debhelper ignoring init script failures on removal is incorrect because if a daemon could *not* be stopped for whatever reason and should have been, leaving it running after the package has been removed constitutes a potential security hole.