DragonFlyBSD

Hmm several comments on that one after a few minutes of research.

A weirder thing is that the behaviour or rcenable is different depending on the program it tries to act on.
For dhcpcd I reproduced, I only get dhcpcd="YES" in my /etc/rc.conf file.
I tried with some other daemon, for example sshd, that gives an error but adds a similar non-prefixed variable.

# rcenable sshd
[: =: unexpected operator
added/modified: sshd=YES
Running /etc/rc.d/sshd start
sshd already running? (pid=632).
# grep sshd /etc/rc.conf
sshd=YES    # rcrun enable sshd

I tried with a port I had called xrdp, that one did end up being added to rc.conf as xrpd_enable=YES

I compared the rc.d scripts of these 3 and read some parts of manual pages, and
from rc(8) :

rcvar        Display which rc.conf(5) variables are used to control
             the startup of the service (if any).

rcrun(8) gives the following concerning the enable command

enable       Sets the corresponding _enable variable in rc.conf(5) to
             "YES" and runs the start command.

So maybe we're a bit on a hybrid situation where we have some things originating from FreeBSD and some others from FreeBSD leading to that non-homogen behaviour.

It looks like there's a port called rclint that is supposed to be a linter for rc scripts, but to which flavour does it apply to, is a question I have no answer to (probably FreeBSD though).

Hey everybody,

I think the issue I was having with this was that dhcpd would not start up at boot time when just giving "dhcpd=YES", or it would not start up when issuing "service dhcpd restart". It might start up with "/etc/rc.d/dhcpd start". IIRC, one of the three things did not work, that's how I noticed the problem. I cannot test this at the moment, but if someone else wants to research this, that'd be great. I might also be completely wrong and my brain cells are leaky. (I should have mentioned this in the issue in the first place).

I think one problem could be the /etc/rc/defaults/rc.conf that contains a `dhcpd_enable=NO` and this might get confused with a `dhcpd=YES` in some way. IIRC, I got similar issues with other services, where calling the script directly would work, while running it via `service abc start` would not.

FYI, there is no dhcpd_enable=NO is /etc/defaults/rc.conf...

Ah I see, you mean there's no dhcpcd=NO in /etc/defaults/rc.conf, so that is incoherent.
because I have

% grep dhcpcd /etc/defaults/rc.conf
                # the DHCP client, e.g., "dhcpcd" or "dhclient" 
dhcpcd_enable="NO"        # Set to YES to run dhcpcd in master mode.
dhcpcd_program="/sbin/dhcpcd" 
dhcpcd_flags="-b" 

Or are you talking about something else as you mention now dhcpd instead of dhcpcd.

So I guess we should just replace dhcpcd_enable="NO" by dhcpcd="NO" in our /etc/defaults/rc.conf, right ?

EDIT :

doas rcenable dhcpcd
# that gives the following
dhcpcd=YES    # rcrun enable dhcpcd
# if I boot there's a dhcpcd running, confirmed by then running :
% doas service dhcpcd restart
Stopping dhcpcd.
Starting dhcpcd.
dhcpcd-9.4.1 starting
DUID 00:01:00:01:2b:4b:29:27:52:54:00:7e:af:b8
forked to background, child pid 902

@daftaupe: Thanks for testing this. Can you also test if "/etc/rc.d/dhcpd restart" works properly? If yes, then all works perfectly fine and I was just confused by the man page or I might have tried to enable another service without _enable suffix and that did not work as rcvar is set differently for that service. I think, allowing dhcpd=YES but not e.g. postgresql=YES would be confusing...

No, there is a "dhcpd_enable=NO" in my defaults rc.conf, so please ignore what I was writing. There is no dhcpd_enable in FreeBSD's defaults rc.conf :).

@mneumann, it works to call through /etc/rc.d/dhcpcd.

% doas /etc/rc.d/dhcpcd restart
Stopping dhcpcd.
Starting dhcpcd.
dhcpcd-9.4.1 starting
DUID 00:01:00:01:2b:4b:29:27:52:54:00:7e:af:b8
forked to background, child pid 1318