Bug #810018: Consider shipping pidof with procps

[Mark Hindley]

Craig,

Thanks for this.

This dates from before my detailed involvement with this area of Debian. I have
read through the bug report, but apologies if I have missed pertinent detail.

I am happy to work with you to achieve this if it is really worthwhile and time
well spent. However, I am yet to find really compelling reasons. The suggestion
seems to have arisen because:-

 1) Upstream sysvinit is dead.

    This is not true. Jesse Smith is active[1], extremely helpful and recently
    migrated upstream away from savannah[2].

 2) Debian sysvinit is dead.

    'The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.'[3]

 3) A desire to reduce the Essential set.

    I understand and appreciate the general motivation for this. However, moving
    pidof to procps would make procps Essential and it is already about 20 times
    bigger than sysvinit-utils, so it does not achieve the aim.

    A new Essential procps-base just containing pidof may achieve this objective
    depending on how the question is framed.  Whilst in many cases the question
    and its answer will be obvious, it is somewhat opaque to me exactly which
    aspect of the Essential set size we are endeavouring to minimise here:
    download size, number of packages, time and cost for debootstrap et al. to
    process the set?

    The pidof in procps-base option would probably reduce the Essential set
    download size by, maybe, a few tens of kB (sysvinit-utils is only 83kB), the
    number of packages would be unchanged and I see no reason to expect the
    processing time to be significantly different.

In short, to me this seems a lot of work for very marginal gain.

What do you think?

Best wishes

Mark

[1]  https://www.patreon.com/posts/62303182

[2]  https://github.com/slicer69/

[3]  attrib. Mark Twain