Bug #810018: Consider shipping pidof with procps

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello Mark, Craig,

On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 10:34:58AM +0000, Mark Hindley wrote:
> 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.
[....]
>  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.
[...]

I don't see why you think pidof (and thus entire procps) must be
Essential. That would indeed be counter-productive. (I haven't re-read
the discussion, but I'm pretty sure we already covered this.)

As I've already proven elsewhere sysvinit-utils (with or without pidof,
which AFAIR is the only semi-useful utility left in that binary package)
can be made non-essential without any problems already.

> What do you think?

I think apart from reducing the essential set, it is also useful to
eliminate pointless differences.

The distributions I've looked at (that are not just following along as a
debian derivate) uses procps pidof already.

Finally I have to say that I will not object to just closing this bug
report (even though I think the original motivation still holds true),
because atleast I don't have the energy to fight for forward movement
anymore.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson