Over at Debian Users, some people are having issues with Recommends verses Depends, having to do with SystemD verses Sysvinit. I thought somebody here might have some Insight.

Note: I happily run Partitions with both Devuan (Ascii and Beowulf) and Debian/SystemD (mainly Buster) and wish to understand both SystemD and Sysvinit.

-------- Original Message --------
On Aug 6, 2020, 9:16 AM, Kenneth Parker < sea7kenp@???> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 6, 2020, 7:42 AM Dan Ritter <dsr@???> wrote:
Urs Thuermann wrote:
> $ aptitude why libpam-systemd
> i systemd Recommends libpam-systemd
> $ aptitude why policykit-1 libpam-systemd
> i A policykit-1 Depends libpam-systemd
>
> But now I see reason: policykit-1 is also installed only because
> virt-manager *recommends* libvirt-daemon-system which depends on
> policykit-1:
>
> $ aptitude why virt-manager libpam-systemd
> i virt-manager Recommends libvirt-daemon-system (>= 1.2.7)
> i A libvirt-daemon-system Depends policykit-1
> i A policykit-1 Depends libpam-systemd
>
> But since that chain is longer, aptitude shows the recommendation of
> systemd. In the output of aptitude purge in my other mail I hadn't
> realized that libvirt-daemon-system is also only automatically
> installed.

Interesting bit here: libvirt-daemon-system supplies the startup
scripts for libvirtd, both sysvinit style and systemd style. It
has no other function.

If you want to use sysvinit *and* libvirtd, you either need to
write your own scripts or extract them from the .deb and not
install it, because the Depends will end up installing
systemd-sysv and thus replacing init.

I wonder what our colleagues, over at Devuan are doing about this. I copied the Devuan Developers list, and will follow their responses on my ProtonMail account.

libvirt-daemon-system ought to be two packages, or the sysvinit
scripts ought to be included with libvirt-daemon.

In unstable, it becomes two packages.

Kenneth Parker