Bug#810018: procps: Please (re)consider shipping procps pidof

[Gioele Barabucci]

On 03/05/26 21:50, Andrew Bower wrote:
>> The plan:
>>
>> 1. I will announce a MBF on d-devel@, with a request for the 94 packages
>> that use `pidof` at runtime to add `Depends: procps` (the email template can
>> be seen at [2], the dd-list at [3]).
> 
> Can I just confirm (as it looks to me) that this covers all runtime
> usage *except* for
> 
>   a) direct usage in an initscript, and
>   b) indirect usage in an initscript via pidofproc where a PIDFILE is
>      *not* defined or cannot be reliably guessed?

Hi Andrew,

there are four uses of pidof:

1) at runtime (Depends:)
2) in tests run at build-time (Build-Depends:)
3) in autopkgtests (Depends: in d/tests/control)
4) in initscripts (see #1131136)

This MBF will focus on 1. Two follow-up MBFs will take care of 2 and 3. 
(Although there are just a handful of packages in categories 2 and 3. I 
believe I'll just send patches instead of doing two proper MBFs.)


>> Does this sound right? Is anything missing?
> 
> Considering the above two cases for initscript, which mercifully are not
> as numerous as I first thought, how should we mitigate them?
> 
> Here are some options:
> 
> 1. [ sysvinit -> procps (global solution) ]
> 
> Make sysvinit-(core|utils) depend on procps. (Does not cover runtime
> usage like initless containers.) I would strongly object to this because
> it is too large a dependency to bring in for all sysvinit installations
> or other inits that fall back to initscripts.
> * No thanks *

I see your point, but why shouldn't the package that ships pidofproc 
(that uses pidof in certain cases), not Depends: on pidof?

Given that the use of pidof in pidofproc is behind a `-x /bin/pidof` 
guard, it should also be OK to accept that pidofproc behaves in a 
different way when pidof is not available. This would avoid the 
additional dependency on procps.

Another alternative would be changing pidofproc's use of pidof into an 
invocation of grep and /proc.

Regards,

-- 
Gioele Barabucci