Bug#1038903: initscripts: orphan-sysvinit-scripts needs to be a prerequisite, not optional.

[David Griffith]

On Thu, 22 Jun 2023, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 01:30:30AM +0200, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 22 Jun 2023, David Griffith wrote:
>>
>>> This was prompted when I found that rsyslog stopped working on Bullseye when
>>> upgraded to Bookworm.  What sort of depenency would you suggest to implement
>>> the following?
>>
>> “Read the release notes.”
>
> What part of the release notes are you referring to? It might be useful to
> reference that specifically, in addition to the pointer.
>
> Nothing relevant is obvious here for rsyslogd:
>
>  https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/index.en.html
>
> We probably want to avoid nasty surprises. I haven't upgraded my servers to
> Bookworm yet, but scanning the release notes, nothing there would indicate
> to me that my logging services were about to break.

Exactly.  This problem started off as a violation of the basic rule of 
least surprise.  When I upgrade an operating system, I don't want to see 
fundamental services not come back.  Stuff like that should be fixed 
before release.  And if found after release, a fix should not be delayed 
until the next major release.

> David's suggestion of requiring orphan-sysvinit-scripts seems like a
> sensible solution that will prevent outages. Let's posit, for instance,
> that there's a hospital somewhere using Debian for some of their
> infrastructure, and running sysvinit because they require reliable systems.
> It would seem responsible to not arbitrarily let logging break on an
> upgrade. That's not what people expect from Debian.

While a life-and-death system shouldn't be running a standard OS at all, 
but instead something realtime, that shouldn't cause anyone to pooh-pooh 
this issue.  No otherwise reliable operating system (RT or not) should 
have things silently stop working without alerting the admin/user of said 
things.


-- 
David Griffith
dave at 661.org