Bug#1131136: sysvinit-utils does not need to be in Essential set

[Gioele Barabucci]

Hi Andrew,

I believe my analysis <https://bugs.debian.org/1131136#18>, in 
particular of Scenario A, addresses all your points (except one, see 
below). Feel free to point out parts that you find wrong or problematic.

On 18/04/26 15:45, Andrew Bower wrote:
> I do like the idea of avoiding extra friction for individual packages to
> be able to hold an initscript. At worst I think we should require
> dh_installinit to add to ${misc:Depends},

That is not needed. As described in Scenario A, init.d-scripts run in an 
environment in which sysvinit-core is installed, and it brings in 
everything that is needed to run init.d-scripts, including 
sysvinit-utils (that is Priority: required anyway).

Counterargument: Should all packages that ship an openrc file also 
Depend on openrc?

> The last one is the interesting one. Are there any use cases for
> initscripts being launched in isolation, by invoke-rc.d or similar? I
> have seen this happen benefically in autopkgtests

My analysis covers autopkgtests and the MBF will include 11 packages 
whose autopkgtest control file will have to be fixed. (I haven't spoken 
much about the details of the MBF because they do not matter until there 
is agreement about the overall plan.)

What my analysis do not cover are cases of programs a) running 
init.d-scripts b) at runtime (outside build-time tests and autopkgtests) 
c) in a system that uses systemd. I do not know if such programs exist. 
If they do, they probably already have measures in place to be able to 
run in distros that do not support sysvinit at all. And for the couple 
of programs that don't do, they will be flagged by their users and their 
dependencies will be patched in unstable. Are any such programs known?

Regards,

-- 
Gioele Barabucci