pending patches to sysvinit and lsb packages

[Mark Hindley]

Adam,

On Sat, May 07, 2022 at 12:41:33AM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> On Fri, May 06, 2022 at 09:26:55AM +0100, Mark Hindley wrote:
> > Unless anybody expresses concerns, I propose to merge and build for experimental
> > along with the fixes for #951651 and #980566.
> 
> [lsb-release]
> 
> Note that there's lsb-release-minimal, currently rotting in NEW, that throws
> away all the historical LSB stuff and leaves only what's actually being used
> in today's programs.

Thanks, I don't think I was aware of that (or had forgotten!)

> Given that we no longer pretend to support LSB, you might want to not spend
> too much time on the old package.
> 
> But then, the fixes are already done (just not uploaded), and the -minimal
> thingy isn't even in the archive yet, much less actually tested as a viable
> replacement, let's go with the upload.

OK.

> On the other hand, perhaps we'd want to merge lsb-base into sysvinit-utils,
> to avoid a transitively-essential package that ships nothing but a 646 byte
> script but costs every single Debian installation over 2 orders of magnitude
> more in various metadata, dpkg status entries and so on.
> 
> That'd get rid of src:lsb completely.

Whilst I appreciate the idea and motivation, there are also moans about
sysvinit-utils being essential[1][2] and I don't really want to reignite either
of those. Yes there is cruft, but resolving it is a considerable amount of work
over at least 2 release cycles.

Mark

[1]  https://bugs.debian.org/851747

[2]  https://bugs.debian.org/946399