Bug#1124643: s-s-d: honour --notify-await when --background not used

Package: dpkg
Version: 1.23.3
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

If you specify --notify-await thinking that it will enact the systemd readiness
protocol on a daemon you will be disappointed unless you also specified
--background.

It would be nice if the notify socket was created, passed on and used in all
cases where --notify-await was specified, not just when start-stop-daemon is
also doing the daemonisation. I would rather not degrade to using --background
when a daemon can already self-daemonise satisfactorily in order to use this
option.

The man page does not make it clear that this is the situation and I am sure I
have already deployed this option somewhere uselessly having not checked the
failure case to make sure it was actually effective, so that aspect is not so
much 'wishlist'!

Thanks,

Andrew

-- System Information:
Debian Release: forky/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 6.17.11+deb14-amd64 (SMP w/24 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages dpkg depends on:
ii  libbz2-1.0   1.0.8-6
ii  libc6        2.42-6
ii  liblzma5     5.8.2-1
ii  libmd0       1.1.0-2+b1
ii  libselinux1  3.9-2
ii  libzstd1     1.5.7+dfsg-2
ii  tar          1.35+dfsg-3.1
ii  zlib1g       1:1.3.dfsg+really1.3.1-1+b2

dpkg recommends no packages.

Versions of packages dpkg suggests:
ii  apt            3.1.12
ii  debsig-verify  0.34

-- no debconf information