On Tue, 09 Jan 2018 at 04:04:39 +0100, Andreas Henriksson wrote: > Using the pidof implementation provided by procps (upstream) would > mean we atleast use the same implementation as other distros, but > wouldn't gain us much else and could even give us new problems.
The other gain would be that one more binary in the Essential set comes from a source package with an active maintainer, and that the maintainers of src:sysvinit (who appear to be too busy with other things to be unable to respond to RC bugs at the moment[0]) can concentrate on supporting systems that boot using the sysvinit/sysv-rc/initscripts cluster of packages, while able to ignore all systems that boot using systemd (and chroots/containers that don't really "boot" at all) as outside their scope. Ian Jackson was positive about that approach in [1]. [0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=811377#104 (I'm not saying that #872039 *should* necessarily be RC, but it's been 4½ months without a maintainer response or a downgrade.) [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=851747#56 > The most practical thing to do at this point seems to be to just wait > until sysvinit is eventually removed from Debian There's a circular dependency here: that can't happen, regardless of the quality or maintenance status of sysv-rc/initscripts, as long as sysvinit-utils is Essential. If there was consensus that booting with sysv-rc/initscripts was no longer something the project had any interest in, then a more likely implementation would be to simplify src:sysvinit by removing all binary packages except sysvinit-utils, which is what's happened in derivatives that require/assume systemd, like Ubuntu (and if Debian was as hostile to non-systemd init systems as some people apparently believe it is, then the same would presumably have happened in Debian). I agree that, if sysvinit *was* ever removed from Debian, that would be a great time to reassess whether pidof needs to be Essential. smcv
