[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#791907: bootlogd RC bug now on my radar.

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello!

This RC bug report has started appearing on my "Maintainer dashboard"
( https://udd.debian.org/dmd/ ) since my sysvinit NMU.

While at first look it seemed simple to get out of the way by just
declaring a package relationship, on second thought it's not that
easy...

bootlogd conflicting with systemd-sysv isn't sufficient since people can
boot with systemd even without having systemd-sysv installed.
Also what would apt do if this relation is there and someone tries to
install bootlogd?  I guess apt might try to satisfy the relation by
removing systemd-sysv and installing some other init system which seems
like a horrible thing to do to users who aren't paying attention and
blindly trusts apt (which many seems to do according to my experience
with bug triaging and user interaction).

Declaring a conflicts against systemd package would also not be right
since it's quite likely people will have that package installed even
when they're using another init system.

(I've also asked systemd maintainers for advice on the above but
they wanted to avoid getting involved in this and said it's up to
bootlogd maintainers.)

Also, it's still unknown /why/ bootlogd doesn't work with systemd!
Apparently bootlogd relies on some facitily not provided by systemd. The
relation should likely be described as a Depends against whatever
provides the required facility, rather than a conflicts against systemd!

Last but not least, this is from the bootlogd source:

> *				*NOTE* *NOTE* *NOTE*
> *			This is a PROOF OF CONCEPT IMPLEMENTATION

http://sources.debian.net/src/sysvinit/2.88dsf-59.4/src/bootlogd.c/#L28

We should probably not ship something just because it compiles, specially
not when it contains an explicit warning about its status.

I'm thus leaning towards simply stop shipping the bootlogd package
by disabling the Package: bootlogd part of sysvinit debian/control
if solving this RC bug is left up to me.
(There are no reverse dependencies of bootlogd package in stretch or sid.)

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson