[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#512821: sysvinit: Please provide /etc/inittab modification hooks

[Larry Doolittle]

Package: sysvinit
Version: 2.86.ds1-61
Severity: wishlist


/etc/inittab is a historical relic.  Useful and standardized, 
but in some ways it is not a good fit to the rest of Debian.

My reading of Debian policy 10.7.1 suggests it qualifies as 
a "configuration file", although not a conffile.

At the moment, runit home-brews a way to insert a line
of its own into /etc/inittab, classed as a policy violation
(bug #510033).

Please provide a hook for other Debian packages to insert lines
to inittab during install, and revert the change during removal.

This request is related to bug #240068, save for the distinction
between a conffile and a configuration file.

I won't be offended if a maintainer tags this "wontfix", but
then this bug will act as documentation as to why runit "fiddles
with other packages configuration files".

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-amd64 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages sysvinit depends on:
ii  initscripts                  2.86.ds1-61 Scripts for initializing and shutt
ii  libc6                        2.7-18      GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libselinux1                  2.0.65-5    SELinux shared libraries
ii  libsepol1                    2.0.30-2    Security Enhanced Linux policy lib
ii  sysv-rc                      2.86.ds1-61 System-V-like runlevel change mech
ii  sysvinit-utils               2.86.ds1-61 System-V-like utilities

sysvinit recommends no packages.

sysvinit suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information