[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] procps with pidof is released

[Steve Langasek]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2013 at 10:03:09PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 09, 2013 at 12:18:00PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> [...]
> > AIUI, you've also proposed including the following list of binaries in
> > procps-base:

> >  > procps-base: pidof, ps, sysctl, pgrep, pkill

> > Currently, the *only* one of these which is used as part of the essential
> > set is pidof.  Why would you put any of the rest of these in an essential
> > package, given that you already have a binary package split between the
> > Essential: yes procps-base and the Essential: no procps?
> [...]

> Discussed here:

> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.general/185723/focus=185725

Well, you proposed it there, but it doesn't seem to have resulted in much
actual discussion; I would expect more effort to be made to get wider input
before adding these interfaces to Essential.

The purpose of the "Essential" flag is to keep a minimal system working at
all points during upgrades.  It is not there to paper over bugs caused by
maintainers being too lazy to properly declare their package dependencies.

Yes, there probably are packages that are making buggy use of these commands
today.  But those are straightforward to find and fix using a lintian check,
as Bastien proposed.  There's no reason to saddle ourselves with more
interfaces that must be supported permanently.

(For values of "permanently" that include "we now have two implementations
of sh in Essential, because no one has done the work to let us get rid of
bash".)

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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