[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#781766: sysvinit should depend on initscripts for a functional /lib/sysvinit/init

[Josh Triplett]

Source: sysvinit
Severity: normal

sysvinit-core depends on initscripts, but sysvinit does not.  However,
sysvinit ships /lib/sysvinit/init, and it should be possible to use
sysvinit by booting with init=/lib/sysvinit/init without having
sysvinit-core installed.  Thus, sysvinit needs to have dependencies on
any packages needed for a functional sysvinit init system, including
initscripts (and potentially other dependencies of sysvinit-core).

Currently, this happens to not break for two reasons: because at least
one essential package (util-linux) depends on initscripts (because it
ships init scripts that depend on init script names provided by
initscripts), and because all three packages that the essential "init"
package depends on depend on initscripts.  However, on a systemd system,
systemd can in the future provide those init script names without a
dependency on initscripts; it already provides almost all of them, and
will likely start providing the rest in the stretch development cycle.
Together with bug 753779 (to ship mountpoint in util-linux instead of
initscripts), this will ensure that the set of essential packages
(including init) will provide fully functional sysvinit-compatible init
script support without necessarily depending on initscripts, so packages
shipping init scripts will be able to drop dependencies on initscripts.

- Josh Triplett

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)