Bug #810018: Consider shipping pidof with procps

[Josh Triplett]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 02:01:14PM +0100, Andreas Henriksson wrote:
> 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.

Exactly. And there have already been issues in which pidof's behavior
changed in unexpected ways because of the needs of sysvinit (e.g.
https://bugs.debian.org/926896 ). Decoupling the two makes such issues
less likely, and removes the one way in which systems not otherwise
using sysvinit have a dependency on sysvinit components.

I wouldn't expect procps to become essential; ideally packages that use
pidof in scripts would add an appropriate dependency. (This would help
people building minimal containers/chroots.) But orthogonally, I think
there's value in migrating pidof to procps.