Hello all. On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 03:49:57PM +0200, Ansgar Burchardt wrote: > Felipe Sateler writes: [...] > > The util-linux maintainer is very much trying to get rid of that > > dependency (I can't find an online reference, but discussed on IRC), > > and it is not done only because apt currently does not deal > > particularly well with versioned Breaks "loops" involving essential > > packages. > > Hmm, then alternatives include: > > - Make "sysvinit-utils" essential (not so nice IMHO). > - Have "init-system-helpers" depend on it. This makes sure it stays > quasi-essential for now.
As already mentioned on IRC but following up here for the record, sysvinit-utils is actually already Essential: yes. (Irrelevant, but I've now filed #823569 for switching util-linux Depends on sysvinit-utils to a Breaks.) Please also note that I'd like to see sysvinit-utils become non-essential in a potential soon future. My investigations seems to suggest that pidof is the only really widely used part of current (>= stretch) sysvinit-utils, so I've filed #810018 where tracking of potentially providing procps pidof as an essential package (eg. procps-base). Other work needed to be able to demote sysvinit-utils to non-essential are also mentioned in that bug report. (Hopefully long-term we can even make pidof non-essential as mostly init scripts is where it's widespead usage comes from, but I don't see those going away any time soon.) Regards, Andreas Henriksson
