Re: Is it the job of Lintian to push an agenda?
Vincent Bernat <bernat@debian.org> writes:
> Lintian got a new tag to enforce Policy 9.11:
> Packages may integrate with these replacement init systems by
> providing implementation-specific configuration information
> about how and when to start a service or in what order to run
> certain tasks at boot time. However, any package integrating
> with other init systems must also be backwards-compatible with
> sysvinit by providing a SysV- style init script with the same
> name as and equivalent functionality to any init-specific job,
> as this is the only start-up configuration method guaranteed to
> be supported by all init implementations.
Policy 9.11 and this provision were introduced in Policy 3.9.4, which was
published in August of 2012. I'm therefore very confused by this
statement:
> As usual with a policy change, it will take years.
since this is not a recent Policy change (in fact, prior to this section
of Policy there was no documentation of support for any init system
*other* than sysvinit), and it's *been* years. So far as I can tell, the
only thing that's new is the Lintian tag. Lintian aspires to testing as
much of Policy as possible, so my baseline assumption would be that
someone contributing to Lintian just got around to doing the
implementation work.
The Policy provision is, as you noted in the bug references I snipped,
arguably buggy in that it doesn't clarly allow for systemd units that
should not or cannot correspond to init scripts, and it could definitely
use some tweaking (as, possibly, could the Lintian tag), but the base
requirement for providing a corresponding sysvinit init script to start a
daemon that is started via a systemd unit file is not new and has been the
Policy requirement since before systemd became the default init system.
> Some people will push back and the result is that a few people can
> impose to everyone else the additional work to maintain SysV init
> script.
Continued support for sysvinit has been the consensus of the project since
the systemd debate. We can, of course, change that, but *that* would be
the change, not this.
> Previously, we had a sort of agreement (through the TC decision) that
> such scripts should be maintained by people caring about them and we
> should only act on bug reports with proper patches to have them.
I don't agree that this was ever the agreement.
> Thanks to this new Lintian tag, the current situation is that packages
> won't pass NEW without a SysV init script (unless a FTP-masters ignore
> this specific tag despite its severity).
I haven't worked on Lintian in several years, so perhaps my information is
stale, but at least previously ftp-master rejects were not based on
severity, but rather on a hard-coded list of tags maintained by
ftp-master.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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