Package: rsyslog Version: 8.2212.0-1 tl;dr: An init script provides a way to start a service in unusual o ad-hoc situations. Keeping it is useful for that (even if it isn't very well tested).
I am trying to make an autopkgtest for a package of mine to run in Debian CI. The package is a networking program, but autopkgtest doesn't support multiple hosts. So I am doing an ad-hoc thing with namespaces, chroot, and so on. The environemnt for each "node" in my test is not a proper install. In particular, I want it to mostly share the filesystem with the the environment provided by autopkgtest. So I don't run a proper service supervisor such as systemd (or indeed any other kind of init). This all works very well. However, my package wants to do some syslog logging and this means I want to start a syslog daemon. I tried rsyslog and everything is fine except that I must install orphan-sysvinit-scripts. Otherwise, my attempts to start rsyslog (via "service rsyslog start") don't work. Now obviously it would be better to have some more proper way of doing all this. But that's not so trivial. Various packages have taken various different ad-hoc approaches. I think this demonstrates that it is useful to have a way of starting a service that doesn't depend on a proper service supervisor. For now I will add orphan-init-scripts as a dependency for my test. Ian. -- Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own. Pronouns: they/he. If I emailed you from @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
