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

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello Sven Joachim.

On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 05:16:43PM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
> Package: sysvinit-utils
> Version: 2.88dsf-59.4
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> With the "init" package no longer Essential, it is possible to remove
> init, sysvinit-core, sysv-rc, initscripts and insserv from minimal
> chroots.  However, startpar remains because sysvinit-utils depends on
> it.

... 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.)

> 
> Could you please drop the dependency which AFAICS was only necessary for
> smooth upgrades from Wheezy to Jessie?  It seems sufficient that sysv-rc
> depends on startpar.

Interesting. Could you please share pointers to back up this claim?

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.
If you're absolutely confident that dropping this dependency is not
problematic at all, then you should be aware that sysvinit has no Debian
maintainers currently so you could always NMU this change..... better
think (more than) twice about it being safe though before going ahead.

Mainly I don't think it's worth attacking this problem so fine-grained
rather than thinking about the bigger picture.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson