Hi Ale,

On Fri, Jul 18, 2025 at 02:28:26PM +0200, Alessandro Vesely via Dng wrote:
> On Thu 17/Jul/2025 18:59:04 +0200 Andrew Bower wrote:
[...]
> > I don't know what a new user gains from hacking or renaming init scripts
> > rather than using tools to manipulate the symlinks.
>
> Another approach is to use /etc/insserv/overrides/. One can change required
> libraries and runlevels there.
>
> My take is to use a fix-init script[*] that rebuilds the LSB header links
> taking into account the existing situation, and also a concise config file
> where I can override which scripts are run at which runlevel, with comments.
> I prefer this because update-rc.d doesn't keep track of its invocations and
> their purposes.

Thanks for sharing your fix-init tool! I like the dry-run mode in
particular - it gives (with -r 0) a clear picture of current differences
from default.

Do you think insserv doesn't do the dependency resolution correctly?
Even with no renumbering requested, your script identified 3 initscripts
to renumber on this host.

I can see that the insserv .start and .stop file extensions try to do
something like your nice concise config file but with less expressivity.

I see the insserv overrides and the config file as potentially a way for
estate administrators to customise a set of hosts while symlink
manipulation would allow the current setting to be changed for an
individual host. But that's just one way of looking at it!

FYI I have taken over maintaining sysv-rc-conf with the first release in
20 years: it has key limitations as to suitable use cases but I have
dealt with a number of bugs and am now working on fixing the
startup/shutdown use cases and other things. Sadly none of the fixes or
improvements are in time for Excalibur.

Andrew