Bug#1499:

[Ian Murdock <imurdock@debian.org>]

   Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 13:27:57 -0700
   From: Bruce Perens <bruce@Pixar.com>

   iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk said:
   > Can't we retire this thing ?

   Yeah, but not _now_. After the release.

I'm not sure that any packages use it, but many packages source it.

In the next release of sysvinit, Bruce, you should remove the

   . /etc/init.d/functions

line from the top of the /etc/init.d/skeleton script.  That will
result in it not appearing in any new scripts.  At some point after
the release, we can mandate that all packages be modified not to use
the /etc/init.d/function script.  Then, after all packages have been
fixed, we can remove /etc/init.d/functions.

As Bruce said, however, this should happen after the release.

(In the meantime, /etc/init.d/functions could be modified to do
nothing, so it doesn't disable exection of the scripts from the
shell, as the current script does.)