Comment 2 for bug 605719

Patrick, thank you for reporting this bug so we can make Ubuntu better!

I've looked at the prerm script, and it would appear that this was fixed in newer versions of the packaging tool debhelper (specifically, dh_installinit's generated prerm code no longer returns an error if the stop fails).

The version you have in 9.04 does this:

# Automatically added by dh_installinit
if [ -x "/etc/init.d/mysql" ]; then
 if [ -x "`which invoke-rc.d 2>/dev/null`" ]; then
  invoke-rc.d mysql stop || exit $?
 else
  /etc/init.d/mysql stop || exit $?
 fi
fi
# End automatically added section

Which will return the error code of the init script.

Whereas in the latest mysql-server-5.1 package, this is run:

# Automatically added by dh_installinit
if [ -e "/etc/init/mysql.conf" ]; then
 # stop fails if not running
 stop mysql || :
fi
# End automatically added section

Which will not return an error, and so should not cause problems during removal.

I am marking this bug as "Fix Released", and attaching it to debhelper as well.