Hi all,

I've read all the followup until 2017-11-22T10:21Z. I may follow up on
selected posts, but I wanted to tackle this first.

KatolaZ writes:

> On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 04:05:47PM +0100, John Hughes wrote:
>> On 21/11/17 15:53, KatolaZ wrote:
>>
>> >What matters is that we need to retain initscripts as "important".
>>
>> If you have sysvinit then it's a damn site more than "important", it's a
>> dependency for sysvinit-core.
>
> I was not referring only to sysvinit. Since the expectation for any
> "pluggable" init system is to not break anything that works (at least
> in Devuan), this point must be taken into account by any candidate
> alternative init system (at least in Devuan).

Devuan has an `init` package that is Priority: required and Essential:
yes (on Jessie) or Important:yes (on Ascii and Ceres). Trying to purge
`init` will warn you sternly and require a magic incantation, something
along the lines of

  WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
  This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
    init
  [...]
  You are about to do something potentially harmful.
  To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'

The init package has a Pre-Depends: sysvinit-core | upstart. Both
packages have a Depends: list that includes initscripts (without any
alternatives for initscripts). Note that upstart is only available in
Jessie (it's purely virtual on Ascii and Ceres).

I have checked this on Jessie, Ascii and Ceres (using my Devuan Docker
base images[1]).

[1]: https://gitlab.com/paddy-hack/devuan/container_registry

Given the above, I don't think there is not much need to make sure that
the `initscripts` package is made Priority: important. On any of the
Devuan versions it will be installed so /etc/rc.local will exist, be
executable and run courtesy of sysvinit-core's or upstart's /sbin/init.

Whether /etc/rc.local will be run (and on what run levels) is, IMHO, a
matter for *your* init system to decide. If your init system wants to
cater to a decades long tradition of running /etc/rc.local at system
startup, it should declare a dependency on initscripts or provide an
/etc/rc.local itself.

If you want to use /etc/rc.local to tweak things, *you* should install
an init system that runs it (and Devuan's `init` package should list it
as a preferred alternative ;-)

Any init systems that deviate from age old traditions, should, ideally,
clearly document that. If they don't, cluebat their maintainers ;-)

And for the masses that don't know what /etc/rc.local is all about?
Well, they wouldn't know either way, so are pretty much unaffected by
all of this anyway.

Does that make sense?
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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