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

[Mark Hindley]

Gioele,

Thanks

On Fri, Apr 24, 2026 at 03:19:21PM +0200, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
> My position is: not all packages that ship an init-script should depend on
> sysvinit-utils. Why? Because init-scripts are not run-time components of
> upstream programs (except a handful of cases that will, in fact require
> Depends: sysvinit-utils). If a user (not a program) wants to run an
> init-script, they must take care of making available everything that the
> init-script requires. That means installing at least sysvinit-core or
> -utils.

I think the concern is only packages whose LSB initscripts use
init-d-script(5). This could be addressed by teaching dh_installinit to add
Depends: sysvinit-utils to ${misc:Depends} or similar. But this needs to be done
before Essential is dropped.

It isn't the user's responsibility to work out the dependencies of a package, it
is declared by the package itself. Policy is clear about that. Obviously Policy
can be changed and if you want to do that, please build the necessary consensus

Mark