I posted this as a comment on the blog, but I'm duplicating here:<p>RHEL and Debian (and their respective derivatives) have different philosophies on packaging, which is why you see this result.<p>The RHEL philosophy is simple; package installation only installs the package, starting daemons is a separate process.<p>The Debian philosophy is that installing a daemon should also make that daemon run, unless it's not possible the make the daemon run securely by default. Things like the /etc/default RUN="no" aren't the package maintainer trying to be clever, but rather them following Debian packaging guidelines. There also the reason you see things like MySQL listening only on the loopback interface by default on Debian.<p>One you understand this the decisions seem a bit less crazy.<p>For me, the big issue with the Debian approach isn't on installation, but rather on upgrade. On Debian, running 'apt-get upgrade' on a live server can cause an unspecified amount of downtime. If you're upgrading MySQL, MySQL will get restarted. If you're upgrading a library on which multiple daemons rely, they will also get restarted. yum upgrade on RHEL doesn't suffer from the same problem, and you can schedule the restart yourself.<p>Again, this is because of a philosophical difference. On Debian, the idea is that if you've asked to upgrade something, it should be upgraded. On RHEL, you can upgrade a package, but continue to run the old (potentially insecure version).