On Fri, 2013-08-09 at 21:10 +1000, Craig Small wrote:[...]
> Besides my Debian duties I am also upstream for procps. I have been in
> discussion with the sysvinit-tools upstream and they want to find a new
> home for pidof so it "fits" with similiar tools (pidof used to be in
> procps in the dark ages). This means shortly that pidof will disappear
> from sysvinit-tools and appear in procps.
>
> If your package uses pidof, we need to talk about it NOW so that this
> change doesn't put you in the lurch. I believe merely depending on procps
> will do what is needed, with the right version.
I don't think this is a sensible thing to ask. There may be lots of
scripts using pidof that their maintainers don't know about. I suggest
using codesearch.debian.net to find the packages.
I also wonder whether it would not be more sensible to split procps into
essential and non-essential binary packages. Aside from pidof, I bet
there are lots of scripts using pkill, pgrep, /bin/kill and ps without
the necessary dependency now. (I saw one using ps just the other day:
#719126.)