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

[Hendrik Boom]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 02:04:08AM +0200, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
> On 21/04/26 11:16, Mark Hindley wrote:
> > I think we might have a confusion in terminology. I apologise in advance if I am
> > already stating something you know.
> 
> Hi Mark,
> 
> thanks for the clarification. I was indeed not thinking of init-d-script(5).
> Now I have integrated it in my analysis.
> 
> > By init-d-script I believe Andrew and I mean the init-d-script(5) library
> > installed at /usr/lib/init/init-d-script by sysvinit-utils that allows
> > declarative LSB initscripts. Any package that uses init-d-script(5) requires
> > sysvinit-utils be installed, as identified by Michael in #826215.
> > 
> > It seems as if packages using init-d-script(5) need to gain a dependency on
> > sysvinit-utils before the Essential bit is removed.
> 
> Once again I think we need to distinguish between different scenarios:
> 
> 1. Custom installations (like init-less container images). As Luca said,
> custom setups always have to do additional steps in order to get the level
> of customization they like. Adding sysvinit-tools will be just one of other
> similar steps (and will be documented in NEWS).
> 
> 2. Initscripts run on systems where init=sysvinit. These initscripts will
> find pidof and init-d-script where they expect it because sysvinit-utils is
> pulled in by sysvinit-core. No extra dependencies needed.
> 
> 3. Initscripts run on systems where init=systemd. These initscripts will run
> only if called at runtime by programs (or systemd service units) shipped by
> a package. Do these packages exist? Yes, I extended my semi-manual analysis
> to extra 1200 candidate packages and, in fact, there is a couple of packages
> that ship programs that call initscripts at runtime. In the future (not soon
> once Essential=yes will be gone, but only once Priority will be set to
> optional), these packages will fail at runtime because of the lack of
> init-d-script. At that point they will need to hard-depend on
> sysvinit-utils.

Do any other init systems that might call one of the sysv initscripts/
I can well imagine that, say, a runit script for some package might call on
a corresponding sysv initscript to do some of its work for it.

-- hendrik
 
> 
> To fix 3, maybe I could start a small MBF for "this package needs
> sysvinit-utils as Depends: because it uses files from it (except pidof) at
> runtime/test-time" before removing Essential:yes from sysvinit-utils?
> 
> But back to the initial intent of the bug report: is there consensus, that,
> with these minor issues fixed:
> 
> a) the Essential bit can be removed, and
> b) pidof can be removed from sysvinit-utils and procps can start shipping it
> (once the pidof-related MBF is mostly completed)?
> 
> ?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> Gioele Barabucci
>