‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, March 21, 2021 10:07 AM, Antony Stone <Antony.Stone@???> wrote:

> On Sunday 21 March 2021 at 10:57:46, Erich Minderlein via Dng wrote:
>

> > In the times of SuSE 7.0 to 7.3 I used runlevels to control a server with
> > attached thin clients. The users on the system got a wall message and had
> > to save their work. After a few minutes the runlevel was reduced from 5 to
> > 3.
>

> That's a long time ago.
>

> > Now I find that the runlevels are identical from 2 to 5 as opposed to the
> > old times, when they were substantially differentiated. (root only, +local
> > multi-user, +network, +Xserver) Is this a heritage of the debian
> > distribution crippled by the poeystemd?
>

> No, Debian has had identical runlevels 2-5 for many releases, nothing to do
> with systemd.
>

> > Can I obtain a devuan different more clever system with update-rc.d ?
>

> I'm not quite sure what you're looking for - I've never tried Debian Buster,
> but Devuan Beowulf works fine for me, and I happened yesterday to have to
> install a sysvinit startup file (for zoneminder, which no longer comes with one
> by default), which got installed using update-rc.d without any problem.
>

> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runlevel#Linux_Standard_Base_specification
> > devuan (beowulf standard installation with some cruft maybe) as I have it
> > on my notebooks does not conform to the LSB.
>

> Devuan is based on Debian, and that project dropped LSB support in 2015:
> https://wiki.debian.org/LSB
>

> You can have LSB, or you can have Debian/Devuan, but it's not easy to have
> both.
>


The only change that I can recall since the very very early days is that the runlevels used to step either incrementally or decrementally through all states between the current runlevel and the target runlevel e.g. 2>3>4>5 and 4>3>2>1 instead of jumping straight to 5 or straight to 1.

The sysvinit scripts require LSB headers on Debian/Devuan. The drop of LSB by Debian refers to not complying with the whole LSB specification which dictates far more than just the init scripts. There is nothing to prevent from defining different states at different runlevels. There is no practical way of determining what will be required at system build time by a generic installation utility, it is up to the system administrator to customise the install appropriately after.

man update-rc.d