Comment 2 for bug 75058

Revision history for this message
In , Shaul Karl (shaulk) wrote : A delay of 60 seconds in the stop target of one of non nut init.d script?

  The following doesn't concern the nut directly. I do post it here
because it is about the general way of shutting down a machine.

  The Debian maintainer of the mgetty-fax package propose the following
method to stop the mgetty-fax process in the stop target of the init.d
script[1]:

    1. Let the process send the queued faxes, provided it will not take
       more then 60 seconds.
    2. If the process still has not terminated after 60 seconds, kill it
       brutally.

By doing this he prevent faxes from being sent twice while still
fulfilling the stop duties in a timely manner.

  I think that:
1. The delay of 60 seconds in case there are queued faxes is not
   acceptable when the ups is in LOBATT state.
2. This is a sufficient reason to reject the maintainer way of doing
   things.

As an aside, I believe that with a 14,400 bps, 60 seconds will suffice
for faxing at most 1 document.

  Any comments?

In addition, should we recommend the Debian people to put a warning for
their start-stop-daemon program so that maintainers will use the ability
to delay the stop target of their init.d scripts sparingly?

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/235196

--
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then
you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I
have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two
ideas." -- George Bernard Shaw (sent by shaulk @ actcom . net . il)