Gotchas

Starting a daemon from postinst

Debconf hangs if a postinst script starts a daemon. debconf must be stopped inserting a db_stop after the debconf code. Debconf uses a pipe to communicate with the postinstall script and does not exit until that pipe is closed. Since processes get a copy of the open file descriptors of the parent process when started this can lead to the daemon holding open the pipe that debconf is waiting to have closed.