[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#825937: sysvinit-utils: Please drop startpar dependency

[Martin Pitt]

Hey Andreas, Sven,

Andreas Henriksson [2016-05-31 22:30 +0200]:
> ... and sysvinit-utils is (still) Essential.
> 
> This is in my opinion where the focus for changing things should be.
> (Making sysvinit-utils non-essential, which means noone cares if
> it depends on startpar. You might even discover people have been
> working on a plan how that could be implemented.)

Right. I just filed https://bugs.debian.org/826205 and will file a
patch/NMU soon, which will allow this to get dropped as well.

> The sysvinit-utils dependency on startpar makes startpar
> quasi-Essential.  This means anything in the archive can always count on
> it being available without a dependency. Given the massive amounts of
> (false?) hits on codesearch.debian.net regarding startpar I'd be very
> worried to make that change myself.

I can't quite believe this. The *only* place that should run startpar
is /etc/init.d/rc{,S}, and that correctly falls back to
CONCURRENCY=none if startpar is absent.

In Ubuntu we never supported startpar (it's incompatible with upstart)
and just dropped the dependency without any ill effect.

FWIW, I'm planning to NMU this together with #826205, I'll send a
patch soon.

Thanks,

Martin

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