Bug#765076: general: No way to have a clean chroot for building packages

[Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org>]

Hi,

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> Santiago Vila wrote:
>> Before systemd arrived, it was possible to have a chroot free from
>> init packages (not needed to build packages).
>
> It seems reasonable for debootstrap --variant=buildd to omit any init
> systems, if it doesn't already.

It seems a bit hacky to have debootstrap exclude essential packages. The
proper solution is (IMHO) to work on dropping the essential bit on init
and work on downgrading its priority from required to important.

Having it no longer essential would stop apt from wanting to reinstall
it. The priority reduction is (again IMHO) reasonable as there are use
cases where one does not need init, like chroot environments. This seems
pretty similar to the kernel.

For this we probably need to a, make sysv-rc essential (for
invoke-rc.d) and b, make sure no package calls "init q" or similar. Last
I heard there were still one or two packages doing so in their postinst.

Ansgar