Pre-Depends: init-system-helpers

[Anthony Towns]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 01:43:37PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Can someone of the systemd maintainers please explain why this is being done
> as a separate helper instead of integrating with the tools that are already
> defined in policy and already part of the base system (e.g., invoke-rc.d)?

I think

 deb-systemd-invoke ~= invoke-rc.d
 deb-systemd-helper ~= update-rc.d

deb-systemd-helper supports more options than update-rc.d (is-enabled,
was-enabled, debian-installed, update-state, reenable, mask, and unmask
in addition to enable and disable; and purge in place of remove), though.

update-rc.d already supports enabling and disabling .service
units. Adding the ability to specify "foo.socket" as well as having
"foo" for "foo.service" seems straightfoward, and adding the additional
actions needed to cope with upgrading services that could be restarted
by dbus/etc during upgrade likewise seems sane.

invoke-rc.d also works with .service units already; extending it to take
over deb-systemd-invoke also seems like it would be straightforward.

Having a single tool that does the basic stuff admins and maintainers need
independent of init system seems like the right approach to me. "*-rc.d"
is a terrible name for such a tool, though :(

>   https://github.com/ajtowns/debian-init-policy
> While this policy mentions deb-systemd-helper, there's no explanation of
> when or why it should be used.

"2.2.4 Maintainer scripts" mentions when and why... Patches welcome if
more explanataion is needed...

Cheers,
aj