[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#826205: Please move /lib/init/{vars.sh, init-d-script} to sysv-rc

[Martin Pitt]

Package: sysv-rc
Version: 2.88dsf-59.4

Hello,

There is an ongoing effort to make fewer of sysvinit's binary packages
essential and even install by default, as most bits are not needed
under systemd.

In particular, we are really close to dropping initscripts from the
"Priority: required" set (in fact, it already dropped out of the
default install in the current Ubuntu development release). All of its
shipped init scripts have native systemd units and thus are not
needed. The only thing that we still need is /lib/init/vars.sh as
quite a lot of init scripts [1] source this unconditionally. Petter
Reinholdtsen said [2] that this file is to be considered official API
for init.d scripts, so as long as we still have packages which only
ship a SysV init script (i. e., many many years), we have to keep
this.

Also, we are close to dropping sysvinit-utils from required/essential.
pidof should move to procps [3], and the very few packages that
actually use killall5 and fstab-decode could just grow a dependency on
it.

Thus I think we should consider keeping sysv-rc as the package that
provides the basic infrastructure for SysV init scripts (/etc/rc?.d/
structure and /lib/init/{vars.sh,init-d-script}), and keep only that
as required/Essential. Thus these two files should move there.

Some of its dependency should also  move, e. g. startpar is only
needed for initscripts [4]. Ideally insserv could be moved to
initscripts as well, but I haven't done research yet whether that
would still be "necessary infrastructure to keep SysV init scripts
working" (I have a hunch that this is the case, as something needs to
create /etc/rc?.d/ links for packages that only have SysV init
scripts, under any init system).

So I'll prepare a patch for moving these two files, and another git
patch for [4], and I'd like to NMU this unless you have objections.

Thanks for considering,

Martin

[1] https://codesearch.debian.net/perpackage-results/lib/init/vars.sh
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=710519#20
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=810018
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825937

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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