Addressing more sysvinit bugs

[Jesse Smith]

On 11/2/18 5:03 PM, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
>> In cases where I have listed the bug as "fixed" or "fixed upstream" it
>> indicates the issue is solved in the current development branch of
>> sysvinit. In this case it's the 2.92 branch, which will likely reach
>> a stable state around the start of 2019.
> 
> This appears to be a bit late for Debian Buster, at least when I look at 
> the freeze timeline¹.
> 


Agreed, 2.92 probably won't make it into Buster. However, I am hopeful
that 2.91 will, which upstreams several Debian patches and fixes several
bugs compared to the older sysvinit 2.88 version.

Since almost everything in the 2.92 branch at the moment is a bug fix
for Debian, perhaps those fixes can be backported in the Debian 2.91
package? I'm not 100% sure of the Debian policy on backporting fixes.


> I also wonder about the Debian bug reports. As far as I remember, you, 
> Jesse, as upstream are not going to close them. I agree with this. 
> However, who else will close them? One way is of course, so close bugs 
> that have fixed upstream with changelog entries with "Closes: #nnnn". 
> There could be a section in the changelog which bugs the new version, 
> 2.9.1 or 2.9.2 at a later time closes. I have seen this in quite some 
> changelogs.

The sysvinit changelog does list Debian bug numbers when a change has
addressed a reported issue. Most of the entries in the 2.92 branch say
things like "Updated manual page to fix ___. This closes Debian bug
#xxx." or "Applied patch from ___. This closes Debian bug #xxx."

My suggestion is for the package maintainer(s) to read through the
changelog when a new version comes out and close the listed Debian bug
reports.

- Jesse