Bug#805487: sysvinit: consider moving invoke-rc.d, update-rc.d and service to src:init-system-helpers

[Andreas Henriksson]

Source: sysvinit
Version: 2.88dsf-59
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I'd like to see the following three scripts moved out of src:sysvinit
and into a init-system-agnostic package:
invoke-rc.d, update-rc.d and service

*-rc.d currently lives in sysv-rc (binary package)
service in sysvinit-utils (binary package)

None of them are really tied to sysvinit.

One idea that has been tossed around is to put them in
src:init-system-helpers which is already a source for
init-system-agnostic utilities.

I asked Petter Reinholdtsen on IRC about this and he said that he
doesn't care much about which git repository the scripts live in, while
also citing that he's not to be considered a sysvinit authority[1].

Martin Pitt commented that both pkg-systemd and sysvinit maintainers
should be able to commit, but this is already possible since
init-system-helpers is maintained in collab-maint where all DDs (+more)
have commit access already. (I'm maintly mentioning this so that
everyone is aware of this "invitation" to continue (co-)maintaining the
scripts where ever they end up residing.)

Unless there are any objections I'll consider working on making this
happen (so please speak up if you object to it!... or are willing to
help).

Apart from just making sure the handover is done correctly I don't see
much possibility of major issues. There's one thing to note and that's
file-rc shipping their own *-rc.d versions (incompatible with systemd).
>From a quick look it seems file-rc uses Replaces: to overwrite the files
but has no matching Conflicts, Breaks or Depends which I wonder if it's
policy compliant. This is not a practical problem though since sysv-rc
nicely saves it by conflicting the other way around. For my first
attempt I'll probably not consider file-rc more then just using a
Conflicts: file-rc, since it has very low popcon (<100 install, even
less vote). We can then improve the situation later... (investigating
why/if file-rc really needs their own versions, switch file-rc to
divert, or whatever ends up being the best solution.)

(Fwiw, please note that I'm not the maintaining any of the involved
packages.)


Regards,
Andreas Henriksson


[1]:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-sysvinit-devel/2012-May/006033.html


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.2
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_DK.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_DK.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

-- no debconf information