Bug#743555: [Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#743555: initscripts: command "halt" unintended changed behaviour

[Pierre Ynard]

> I wondered, why the behaviour of the command halt might have changed.

> Does this maybe be related to the change from sysinit to systemd?

I surmise that yes, and that systemd - and upstart - use a different
default behavior than sysvinit.

> I don't know why you are seeing a behavior change here in Debian, but
> this is a FAQ in Ubuntu. You are right that for a very long time,
> the behavior of 'halt' in sysvinit, as influenced by the contents of
> /etc/default/halt, was to 'poweroff'. However, a careful reading of
> the documentation shows that this was actually a *bug*; the 'halt'
> command, without arguments, should always have been configured to
> do a non-poweroff halt, and /etc/default/halt should only ever have
> affected the behavior of 'shutdown -h'.
>
> The standard behaviors should always have been:
>
>   shutdown -P == halt -p == poweroff: halt the system and power down
>   shutdown -H == halt: halt the system, do not power down
>     shutdown -h: halt or power off, depending on /etc/default/halt

Steve, which documentation exactly do you base this on and how
authoritative is it supposed to be?

Jesse, what do you think of this? There seems to be a conflict of
opinion here.

-- 
Pierre Ynard