[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#610185: sysv-rc.postinst needs to provide more balanced description of insserv pros and cons

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

severity 610185 wishlist
thanks

[Mike Bird] wrote:
> Blindly enabling insserv can result in unbootable systems or systems
> which boot but don't start all services.  sysv-rc.postinst currently
> states that enabling insserv is "recommended", with no mention of
> the possible severe consequences.

The current template ask users /usr/share/doc/sysv-rc/README.Debian
for more information, which is the place I believe it is best to add
more information on the consequences.  We used to have more text in
the template, but was adviced by the translators to trim down the text
and move it to the README.

Note that the legacy boot ordering is filled with hard to fix bugs
(incorrect ordering), and this is the reason for recommending to move
to the new dependency based boot sequencing.  The improved speed is a
by-product and not the main advantage of dependency based boot
sequencing.

> This bug is critical rather than grave because the lost data - the
> Snn and Knn values - cannot be recovered without restoring a backup.

The information is not really lost.  The values present during
conversion is saved in /var/lib/update-rc.d/, and restored when
migrating to file-rc.

> (In fact it's slightly worse than that - if you merely restore /etc
> insserv will eat it again.  You have to use undocumented magic to
> prevent this.)

I assume you mean the /etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering when you talk
about undocumented magic.  I thought it was documented, but it might
be an idea to verify this.

Given your strong feelings about boot script ordering, I suspect you
are better off using file-rc until it is adjusted to use dependency
based boot sequencing.  I am convinced the static sequence numbers are
slowly going to become unmaintained in Debian, as more and more stop
caring about their values, so it might be a good idea to adjust to the
dynamic dependency based boot sequencing sooner than later.

I believe this issue at most is a wishlist issue, and I note at least
one of the release managers believe this is a none-issue (he closed
the bug), so I adjust the severity.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen