Debian's thinking on this is that a user won't install a daemon unless he wants it to run, and that a package should get everything into an immediately useable

Debian's thinking on this is that a user won't install a daemon unless he wants it to run, and that a package should get everything into an immediately useable state by default. Therefore, a daemon should be started automatically when a package is installed. I agree with the objection: I think that times have moved on, and in reality today people use configuration management tools and almost always want to change the default configuration on a server daemon. Therefore, it doesn't make much sense to start it automatically. As bashtoni says: this isn't a problem with package maintainers. It's a problem with Debian Policy. A stepping stone to a full solution is to arrange a standard to configure the system not to start a daemon by default, and arrange for packages to follow that standard. policy-rc.d is just such a standard.