Breaking init swtich: was Re: sysvinit_3.14-2_source.changes ACCEPTED into experimental

[Thorsten Glaser]

On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Mark Hindley wrote:

>I don't think apt or dpkg recognise a 'group' of Protected: yes
>packages with common Provides. But it might be a solution to propose.

I don’t think this meshes well with the current Provides, which has a
long history as XB-Important.

>As Sean Whitton pointed
>out, Protected: yes is poorly documented and its intended usage unclear[1]

Huh? It does what it says it does, and it does that well.

--allow-remove-essential

>I have just tried switching from sysvinit-core/experimental to runit-init and
>the only way that succeeds for me is to use
>
>  DPKG_FORCE=remove-protected dpkg --remove sysvinit-core

Hmm. I don’t have a sid install at hand, but, supposedly,
$ sudo apt-get --allow-remove-essential install systemd- sysvinit-core
at least should work. Breaking out to dpkg is not something I’d
consider acceptable.

Before bookworm, apt was better, and you could just…
$ sudo apt-get install systemd- sysvinit-core
… and had to type “Yes, do as I say!” and it would, but I’ve
recently read that the above flag is supposed to replace that.

(The apt maintainer unfortunately considers this regression progress.)

bye,
//mirabilos, who would be glad to read less Devuan advertisements
             on this mailing list, thank y’all very much
-- 
„Cool, /usr/share/doc/mksh/examples/uhr.gz ist ja ein Grund,
mksh auf jedem System zu installieren.“
	-- XTaran auf der OpenRheinRuhr, ganz begeistert
(EN: “[…]uhr.gz is a reason to install mksh on every system.”)