[Debian-ha-maintainers] Bug#1136548: pacemaker uses pidof but does not depend on procps

[Gioele Barabucci]

Control: severity -1 minor

On Thu, 14 May 2026 01:30:21 +0200 Gioele Barabucci <gioele at debian.org> 
wrote:
> it appears that pacemaker uses `pidof` in its testsuite, or that
> at least one of its binary packages uses `pidof` at runtime.
> Historically, `pidof` was provided by the Essential package
> `sysvinit-tools`, making an explicit dependency unnecessary. However
> `pidof` will soon be moved to `procps` and will no longer be part of
> the Essential set.
> 
> Please add an explicit dependency on `procps`:
> 
> * via the `Depends:` field of all binary packages of pacemaker
>   that use `pidof` at runtime;
> * via the `Build-Depends:` field of pacemaker, if `pidof` is
>   used in tests run at build-time;
> * via the `Depends:` field of `debian/control/tests`, if `pidof` is
>   used in autopkgtests.
> 
> To prevent any disruption for users of pacemaker, please add
> this dependency now, before `pidof` is moved from `sysvinit-utils` to
> `procps`. Alternatively, you could remove all uses of `pidof`.
> 
> It is believed that pacemaker uses `pidof` due to the following
> code snippets:
> 
> ```
> path: pacemaker_3.0.1-1.1/etc/init.d/pacemaker.in
> 		if status $prog > /dev/null 2>&1; then
> 			touch "$LOCK_FILE"
> 			pidof $prog > "@localstatedir@/run/$prog.pid"
> 			success
> 		else
> 
> [...]


Dear pacemaker maintainers,

all occurrences of `pidof` in pacemaker seem to be in initscripts. 
Iniscripts in Debian are supposed to use `pidofproc` instead of relying 
on `pidof`.

Please patch the initscripts to use `pidofproc` or add a dependency to 
`procps` (maybe as Recommends?).

In the meantime I'll reduce the severity of this bug report to minor, as 
it only affects non-standard installations of Debian.

Regards,

-- 
Gioele Barabucci