Control: retitle 851747 sysvinit-utils: drop Essential flag Control: severity 851747 wishlist
On Wed, 18 Jan 2017 at 23:21:46 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > I have done this now, with a changelog entry that closes these two > bugs. I think that is appropriate but I'm sure someone will complain > if not. I still think it would be good for sysvinit-utils to not need to be Essential, because the Essential set is larger than it needs to be. (In particular, minimal/buildd sid chroots as produced by debootstrap don't have /sbin/init any more, because a chroot doesn't need it; so it seems weird for them to be required to contain helpers for sysvinit/LSB init scripts that they will never run.) So I would prefer if you didn't close #851747, but I'm dropping its severity: a maintained package in the Essential set is a lot better than an unmaintained one, but a smaller Essential in buster would be better still. This is clearly not something that will/should be fixed in stretch though. There is some discussion on https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=810018 about what remains in sysvinit-utils. While I don't think pidof really deserves to be Essential, it's still too widely-used to not be; but other distributions ship pidof from procps, and we could do the same. The rest of the entry points (e.g. fstab-decode, with 2 users in the archive) are sufficiently narrow that their users could likely just gain Depends instead. This would mean that the (newly revitalised) sysvinit packaging team would only need to be responsible for systems that actually boot using sysvinit, and not systems that boot using systemd or init-less chroots that don't "boot" at all. S
