Bug#851747: sysvinit-utils: unmaintained package should not be Essential

[Dmitry Bogatov]

[2017-01-19 10:37] Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org>
> 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.)

Well, there is enough redundancy in Debian. This one does not seem to be
that severe.

> 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.

You are welcome to make it happen. But you may want to know, that
`pidof.c' in procps is much smaller then `killall5.c' in sysvinit.
Probably, these two versions are not interchangeble.