Bug#711853: insserv: Design bug: rcN.d unstable and not, maintainable
Alessandro Vesely
vesely at tana.it
Thu Apr 18 17:30:58 BST 2019
On Thu 18/Apr/2019 12:43:24 +0200 Ian Jackson wrote:
> Dmitry Bogatov writes:
>>
>> As far as I know, "A depends B, B depends A" situation is called
>> RC-critical bug.
>
> If shipped by Debian but it can perhaps arise due to old packages,
> ad-hoc packages, etc. I agree that it's wrong but ISTM that it is
> better not to break things if we don't need to.
>
> But I think the current behaviour of insserv in this situation is to
> bomb out completely and refuse to operate, isn't it ? So it already
> fails to disturb the existing symlinks ?
At least, that's what happens at mine. I had to write a quick script to
overcome that, http://www.tana.it/sw/fix-init/.
> As for "stable sort":
>
> So IMO if someone wants to send a patch which improves the algorithm
> so that it preserves more of the existing link ordering, when
> right now it doesn't care, we ought to consider it. (We'd want to
> be sure it didn't have any meaningfully different behaviour in
> "normal" configurations.)
Rather than a patch, I'd consider an alternative executable. The link above
displays a man page for the script. I'm not advocating that script, as it has
many defects. However, I like its man page and its options. I don't think
sparse patches to insserv can result in similar behavior.
> Note that the existing scheme parallelises things when the
> dependencies permit, and we should not take a patch which fails to
> parallelise things just because the existing links aren't parallel.
Here's a point I had never considered. Perhaps, that's because I tend to boot
very sparingly --even on laptops, since suspend works well enough. I accept
parallelism can be a very important point for several people. An instance of
diversity?
Best
Ale
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