Bug#1039102: debian-policy: make systemd units mandatory for packages shipping system services

[Luca Boccassi]

Package: debian-policy
X-Debbugs-Cc: pkg-systemd-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org

systemd upstream will drop support for the transitional sysv generator
in the near future. The transition is long finished, it's been at least
a decade, and it's time for the tail of packages still shipping only
init scripts but not units to be updated.

Tentatively this should happen within Trixie's development cycle. Of
course it's free software and generators are not that difficult to
maintain, so if someone wanted to lift the sysv generator out of the
systemd repository and adapt it to be a standalone binary there's
nothing stopping them. But I wouldn't want the systemd package to
depend on such a backward compat tool, so packages needing this
hyptothetical package should depend explicitly on it. This is just
mentioned for completeness, it's been at least a decade and writing a
unit file is beyond trivial so there shouldn't be any issue adding the
few remaining ones.

Once the policy is updated I plan to ask Lintian to bump the severity
of the existing check:

https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/407

Patch attached and pushed to
https://salsa.debian.org/bluca/policy/-/commits/mandatory_units?ref_type=heads

-- 
Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi
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