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

[Bill Allombert]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:01:37AM +0100, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> Russ Allbery wrote:
> >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."""
> >
> >I went to write the patch for this, but I paused when I saw that the other
> >part of this sentence (explicitly running such scripts with sh at other
> >run levels) is implemented.  The current /etc/init.d/rc runs the script
> >directly if it doesn't end in .sh but runs it with sh if it does.
> >
> 
> As alternative, I propose not to use the suffix .sh:
> - now we change /will be sourced/could be sourced/ , with a footnote that
>   deprecated such feature
> - we bugs package, to remove the suffix .sh
> - after most of the most important packages removed the .sh suffix,
>   the policy remove the exception, maybe introducing a footnote which
>   shortly explain the past rules (this will simplify the writing of
>   rationale in the new doc)
> 
> Rationale:
>   users could be confused by the .sh suffix.

While I agree in general that the .sh suffix should not be mentionned
unless it has a specific meaning, I am afraid that your proposal will
be technically troublesome, because the file /etc/init.d/*.sh are
conffiles and renaming conffiles is a pain. Since such files are
critical at startup, I am afraid than an attempt to rename them will make
the upgrade path to squeeze more fragile.

> > At least on my system, all of the scripts ending in .sh have a proper #!
> > line and are executable, so this wouldn't make any difference there, but I
> > wanted to double-check first before also removing that since it appears to
> > be implemented.
> 
> hmm. All init.d script should be executable, with proper #! header.
> Sysadmin are used to manually /etc/init.d/foo >stop|start|restart|reload>
> So I don't understand your commentart.

I think Russ point is that there is no reason for policy to mandate to
run them with 'sh /etc/init.d/foo' if you can just run them directly as
'/etc/init.d/foo', as you suggest.

If we are going to remove """Also, if the script name ends in .sh, the
script will be sourced in runlevel S rather than being run in a forked
subprocess""", then we can just remove any difference in handling 
a script called /etc/init.d/foo.sh versus /etc/init.d/bar.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe at debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.