make the debian package never start by default

Currently the debian package that installs cassandra starts cassandra by default. It sounds like that is a standard debian packaging convention. However, if you want to bootstrap a new node and want to configure it before it creates any sort of state information, it's a pain. I would think that the common use case would be to have it install all of the init scripts and such but not have it start up by default. That way an admin can configure cassandra with seed, token, host, etc. information and then start it. That makes it easier to programmatically do this as well - have chef/puppet install cassandra, do some configuration, then do the service start.

With the current setup, it sounds like cassandra creates state on startup that has to be cleaned before a new configuration can take effect. So the process of installing turns into:

• install debian package
• shutdown cassandra
• clean out state (data/log dirs)
• configure cassandra
• start cassandra

That seems suboptimal for the default case, especially when trying to automate new nodes being bootstrapped.

Another case might be when a downed node comes back up and starts by default and tries to claim a token that has already been claimed by another newly bootstrapped node. Rob is more familiar with that case so I'll let him explain it in the comments.