[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#339955: Bug#513955: debian-policy: do not require /etc/init.d/*.sh scripts to be sourced

[Russ Allbery]

Kel Modderman <kel at otaku42.de> writes:

> It is the opinion of myself and Petter Reinholdtsen, maintainers of the
> sysvinit package, that the last sentence of §9.3.1 of policy is no
> longer relevant and should be removed:
>
> """Also, if the script name ends in .sh, the script will be sourced in
> runlevel S rather than being run in a forked subprocess, but will be
> explicitly run by sh in all other runlevels."""
>
> The reasons for which it should be removed are:
>
> * /etc/init.d/rc has not supported this for an extremely long time, probably
>   never, because the system would be unbootable due to .sh scripts calling
>   'exit' [0, 1].

Given this, I definitely agree.  There's no point in having a statement
like this in Policy when our core packages don't implement it and no one
has apparently cared.

Unless someone steps up to say that we should do the work to reimplement
support for this interface (including fixing all the broken *.sh scripts
we have now), I think it's obvious we should simply remove it.  There's no
need to specify things no one uses and clearly can do without.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>