[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Future of update-rc.d in wheezy+1

[Roger Leigh]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 10:44:53AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> Roger Leigh <rleigh at codelibre.net> writes:
> 
> > This means that the runlevels and sequence numbers passed as
> > arguments to update-rc.d will never be used; they will just get
> > silently discarded.  The main problem as I see it is that these
> > numbers are going to bitrot badly--they aren't being tested, while
> > the dependency information in the header is being used by everyone.

> You say the numbers are going to bitrot, which I totaly agree. But that
> could be prevented.
> 
> The numbers specified for update-rc.d must be well ordered according to
> the dependencies specified in the LSB headers. That means that that
> update-rc.d could keep a record of the numbers specified and check that
> the numbers are valid even though sysv-rc/insserv then ignore them.

While we could expend the time and effort to do this, I do have to
question why.  What would be the point of this?  No one is using
those numbers, so why retain them?  It seems, to me, to be an
entirely pointless waste of valuable developer time.  And not just my
time, but for every developer who would need to continue to test and
validate the numbers for their scripts.

We have dependencies for a reason, and the sequence numbers are now
nothing more than a historical artifact.


Regards,
Roger

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