Re: Transition of initscripts to new order / sequence number

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Jan Wagner]
> while thinking about how to solve #508189, where I need to change
> the position of the initscript in bootorder, I thought it would not
> sufficient to change only the call of dh_installinit in the rules
> file.

This is the kind of issues the dependency based boot sequencing is
ment to solve.  It generate the boot ordering based on dependencies
specified in each init.d script.  See
<URL:http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot> for
more info on this effort.

> If an user changed the symlinks, I guess I will break his
> changes. How should we handle this? Is there any best practise
> and/or policy how we should deal with it? I think it's not usefull
> just to override the changes by the local sysadmin.

At the moment, the only option that work with both sysv-rc and file-rc
is to remove all symlinks and reinstall them.  This is not a very good
option, but given the limitation of the update-rc.d API, it is the
only one that work.

Kel Modderman has been working on extending the update-rc.d API to
allow for more fine grained adjustment of init.d symlinks, and I hope
it will be available for the next stable release.  Until then, no good
and portable option exist.  Please see the posts linked from
<URL:http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/initscripts-ng-devel/2008-September/thread.html>
for more information about the proposed API.

I know some package maintainers handle this by ignoring the existence
of file-rc and just removing symlinks directly in /etc/rcX.d/.  As
long as file-rc exist and is supposed in Debian, I believe it is a bad
idea. :(

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen