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

[Matthias Geiger]

On Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:08, Andrew Bower <andrew at bower.uk> wrote:
>Hi Gioele and others,
>
>On Sat, Apr 18, 2026 at 09:52:25PM +0200, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
>> 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.
>
>Thank you for your effort to make sure all use cases are considered!
>
>> 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).
>
>Yes, as I continued, IMHO it is preferrable to have an indirect way of
>expressing this environment-specific dependency rather than doing the
>above.
>
>> Counterargument: Should all packages that ship an openrc file also Depend on
>> openrc?
>
>At present, I don't believe any packages ship openrc integration other
>than fallback initscripts because they don't have an overriding
>directory where they can use the openrc interpreter. (I expect that
>openrc users will want to add such a thing in due course so they can get
>the full benefit of openrc.) So packages won't need to change but openrc
>will need to gain a dependency on sysvinit-utils, obviously.
>
Side note:

openrc 0.64 will support /etc/rc/ as location for "native" openrc 
scripts. There are few packages shipping a "native" openrc script, and 
they use the sysvinit ones. As long as the use those they will need to 
deal with all the sysvinit stuff (insserv, sysvinit-utils, etc.).

However, I hope to move at least a small essential set to native openrc 
ones. Ideally, openrc is decoupled from sysvinit one day, but I don't 
see that happening for forky.

best,

werdahias