info

there appears to be a way to stop daemons from being started when they are installed: apparently just create /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d with "#!/bin/sh; exit 101"

the way I read it (here's a link that's not an e-mail: http://people.debian.org/~hmh/invokerc.d-policyrc.d-specification.txt) scripts usually call invoke-rc.d but if you have policy-rc.d that gets called.  I'm not sure where else invoke-rc.d is called and don't know what the consequences would be

other

# Create a policy-rc.d to stop maintainer scripts using invoke-rc.d from
# running init scripts. In case of maintainer scripts that don't use
# invoke-rc.d, add a dummy start-stop-daemon.
disable_daemons () {
	cat > /target/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
exit 101
EOF