Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@???> writes:
> Rainer Weikusat wrote:
>> Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@???> writes:
>>
>>> Alexey Rochev wrote
>>>> *Date: *2015-08-05 07:29 -400
>>>> *To: *dng
>>>> *Subject: *[DNG] Init scripts in packages
>>>> Currently Debian packages contains both systemd units and init scripts.
>>>> However, Debian developers refused to support several init
>>>> systems. So it's
>>>> only a matter of time when they remove init scripts from packages.
>>>> What will Devuan developers do when it happens? We can use sysvinit and
>>>> Devuan because these init scripts exist.
>>> It occurs to me that nobody raised the obvious questions:
>>>
>>> 1. Are we seeing upstream developers shipping systemd scripts, or
>>> systemd scripts w/o sysv init scripts? I'm not sure I have.
>>> 2. What the heck are Debian developers (packagers, actually), doing
>>> removing init scripts?
>> There's an answer to that and it's "it doesn't matter" (I tried to point
>> that out in an earlier reply). On the wheezy system I'm using to write
>> this, 'init scripts' make up 6789 LOC, nobody has the power to make them
>> disintegrate and I'd be very much surprised if there are more than 2000 LOC
>> in there which actually do something useful. Actually, I expect
>> yes. init scripts should be trivial and if they're not, something else
>> is amiss.

[...]

> Right now, init script come from upstream, Debian "developers" (I
> really can't bring myself to call a packager a developer) test & tweak
> the upstream scripts to fit the Debian environment. If they stop
> doing that, someone is going to have to do that for Devuan.

Do they actually come 'from upstream'? When debianizing a package via
dh_make, one of the debian/ template files generated by it is 'something
which should become your init script'. This suggests that 'the Debian
scripts' ultimatively come from the respective package maintainers (who
may have written them or may have gotten a working script from elsewhere
and adapted that). In any case, they'll be part of the Debian-specific
package files afterwards.

Also, to re-iterate this: What an init script needs to do is really only
'start a process'/ 'stop a process'. Most of the other code which crept
in there during the last 15 - 20 years will fall into one of two
categories

    1) Never did anything useful
        2) Should never have been implemented in this way.

This is a non-tempest in a teapot nobody ever really saw.        

> Worse, if "refuse to support multiple init systems" means that the
> Debian packagers start stripping out the init scripts from Debian
> packages, those, those packages become useless in Devuan.

Last time I looked, the point of Apache was "it's a web server" and not
"it comes with an init script" so this seems to have been blown somewhat
out of proportion. Even if 'Debian developers' should stop shipping
'init scripts' as part of their packages at some point in time in the
future, this won't cause them to disappear from packages people already
installed. And even in the extremely unlikely case to
$evil_debian_developper invades your computer in the middle of the
night and steals $mission_critical_init_script (this happening
simultaneously on all computers in the world), they'll be trivial to
replace.

This is actually such an absurd idea that I have some trouble
considering it a serious concern (no disrespect intended --- I'm a
developer and this seems 'a trifle' to me but maybe not to everybody
else).