Demoting "init" to Priority: important

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello Ansgar Burchardt.

Thanks for pushing this forward...

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 03:11:45PM +0200, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> as written earlier[1] I would like to demote the "init" package from
> Priority: required & Essential: yes to Priority: important.
> 
> This needs at least a change to the provider of update-rc.d/invoke-rc.d:
> these two programs are called in maintainer scripts and should probably
> be provided by an essential package[2]. This means moving the Essential:
> yes bit from "init" to "sysv-rc"; as sysv-rc is already pseudo-essential
> this should be no real issue.

A similar discussion surfaced on IRC a while ago where there was a
proposal to move update-rc.d and invoke-rc.d to an init-agnostic
provider, like for example a package built from src:init-system-helpers.
(Possibly also move /usr/sbin/service from initscripts to the same
package while at it to fully get rid of the need for other init systems
to depend on sysvinit-provided packages?)

I think this would be easier to do then trying to turn the dependency
chain in packages built from src:sysvinit around. They seem very
upside-down to me. I bet the reason sysv-rc pulls in insserv, startpar,
sysvinit-utils are mostly a historic legacy....

As a bonus, if these tools ends up in src:init-system-helpers they would
end up in the hands of the maintainers who seems to be the people
posting patches and effectively maintain them already...

Hopefully pitti and mbiebl can shine some more light on the details for
this alternative...

> 
> Do we need any other changes in order to demote "init"?
> 
> Ansgar
> 
>   [1] <https://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2015/05/msg00156.html>
>   [2] I'm not opposed to changing that, but doing so probably requires
>       changing all packages providing init scripts.


Regards,
Andreas Henriksson