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

[Luca Boccassi]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2026 at 10:16, Mark Hindley <mark at hindley.org.uk> wrote:
> However, there is a usage case for LSB initscripts in initless containers when
> sysvinit-core is not installed and therefore neither sysvinit-utils. In such
> containers I routinely run 'service <name> start|stop...'. Maybe that is just my
> habit; I don't know how common such practices are.

In any such cases the image builder simply has to pull in what they
require for their custom use cases, like they already do for anything
else they want to include in such images. This is really not a reason
to make something "essential" and thus mandatory for _every_ single
installation/image/etc regardless of the use case, otherwise it would
equally apply to any other of the ~60k binary packages that anybody
might want to use in a custom local setup. The change can be
communicated in a NEWS entry and in the release notes.