Jesse, On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 11:29:23AM -0300, Jesse Smith wrote: > Is there a reason for wanting to revert this behaviour instead of using > the "-z" flag on the command line? If you use pidof a lot and expect to > see processes that are in the uninterruptable sleep state then making an > alias of pidof='pidof -z' seems like a straight forward approach.
I am trying to get a consensus on how we deal with this. Personally, I was convinced by Tim's argument, particularly the one of least surprise. I too would expect pidof to return processes in D. Yes, a user could create an alias, but I am sure that pidof is used in scripts where that approach is more difficult. And it is conceivable, although undocumented to my knowledge, that such script usage has been broken by this change. Also start-stop-daemon is now a binary and no longer uses pidof as its script predecessor did. Therefore the original report[1] that requested this change is obsolete. Going forward, my gut reaction is that if start-stop-daemon still fails in the case of stuck NFS mounts, that should be addressed in src:dpkg rather than by excluding processes from pidof. But I am open to be persuaded! It is a difficult issue that benefits from diverse minds and approaches. Thanks Mark [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=719273
