Draft of email to debian-devel

[lorenzo]

Hi Mark,

> My personal view is that we should resist an orphan-cron-jobs package
> and keep cron jobs in their parent package. But others may disagree?
I agree: I think many systemd users (and developers too) that are
running systemd prefers cron jobs over timers. There is even work in
progress to migrate the default cron from cron (upstream dead since
ages) to cronie, so removal of cron jobs will be a problem not only for
alterative init users.

> and uncoordinated removal can render users' systems unbootable[2].

Can you elaborate on this? I may be wrong, but I don't understand how
the removal of mdadm script can render the system unbootable: the
script runs mdadm in monitor mode and starts in runlevel 2. There is no
script (removed) in runlevel S, I suspect a fail to boot will involve a
problem in the kernel or in udev rules (that are still there)?

Lorenzo

On Tue, 20 Jun 2023 10:41:02 +0100
Mark Hindley <mark at hindley.org.uk> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> There have been a few recent discussions on #debian-init regarding
> the removal of src:mdadm's initscripts[1] and orphan-sysvinit-scripts.
> 
> I am concerned that the current rate of drop of initscripts may become
> unsustainable[2]. Daniel Baumann is also proposing an orphan-cron-jobs
> package[3][4].
> 
> My personal view is that we should resist an orphan-cron-jobs package
> and keep cron jobs in their parent package. But others may disagree?
> 
> I would like to improve the way initscripts are represented in the
> Policy. Just waiting for users to report breakage after they have
> been dropped seems inadequate. I am aware that this has the potential
> to reopen a whole mess of old wounds and I want to keep it as
> uncontroversial(!) as possible.
> 
> An initial draft for discussion is attached. All comments are very
> welcome.
> 
> Thanks and best wishes
> 
> Mark
> 
> [1]  https://bugs.debian.org/1037496
> 
> [2]  There are currently about 1150 packages in unstable main which
> ship a file in /etc/init.d
> 
> [3]  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1037496#55
> 
> [4]  There are currently about 220 packages in unstable which ship a
> file in /etc/cron*
>