[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#705030: Insufficient docs about changes due to insserv/startpar

[martin f krafft]

Package: sysv-rc
Version: 2.88dsf-41
Severity: minor

Ever since I started using SysV, putting a script into e.g.
/etc/rcS.d/S99foobar was an acceptable way of ensuring its execution
at boot. Arguably, that is not the Debian way and might even be
against policy, but it's worked for 20+ years.

It no longer does. The reason is that startpar now decides what to
run, rather than readdir(), using information provided by insserv.

Using update-rc.d to install a symlink to a script in init.d does
work. However, this is not really explained in /etc/rcS.d/README,
nor in /etc/init.d/README, nor in /usr/share/doc/sysv, nor in the
manpages of startpar or insserv.

Instead, these documents carry a lot of historical information that
isn't really applicable or interesting anymore to anyone but
researchers looking into the evolution of SysV on Debian.

I realise I am growing old.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.8-trunk-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_NZ, LC_CTYPE=en_NZ.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages sysv-rc depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.49
ii  insserv                1.14.0-5
ii  sysvinit-utils         2.88dsf-41

Versions of packages sysv-rc recommends:
ii  lsb-base  4.1+Debian9

Versions of packages sysv-rc suggests:
pn  bum           <none>
pn  sysv-rc-conf  <none>

-- debconf information excluded


-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at d.o>      Related projects:
: :'  :  proud Debian developer               http://debiansystem.info
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck    http://vcs-pkg.org
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
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