Re: Policy consensus on transition when removing initscripts.

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org> writes:

> While I find this discussion really interesting, is this really relevant
> for orphan-sysvinit-scripts? After all, it doesn't ship any conffiles in
> /etc, i.e. it doesn't take over any (conf)files from packages that
> dropped their initscript.

> Have you actually looked at what orphan-sysvinit-scripts does?

Uh... good call.  *embarrassed look*

I'm sorry, I appear to have added a lot of noise to this thread based on
some entirely incorrect assumptions.  I also missed the (in retrospect
rather obvious) observation that the init script is a conffile.

I have now looked at the package, which I should have done at that the
start, and I think the points that remain valid now that I've corrected my
misunderstanding are:

* There is some documentation in the package about how to add a new
  script, but it's aimed at sysvinit maintainers.  I continue to think
  it's reasonable to ask maintainers who are dropping an init script to
  open a bug against orphan-sysvinit-scripts, although I respect the
  opinion that it would be better to automate this (and I do think
  automating it will be more effective in the long run, since we have no
  way of reaching maintainers that will get them all to open bugs or even
  be aware that they should, as much as we might prefer otherwise).  But
  we need documentation aimed at package maintainers somewhere, whether
  that be Policy, the Developers' Reference, the wiki, etc., in order to
  make that request.

* Coordination still seems like something we'd normally do with this type
  of transition, even though unpurged packages might keep their init
  scripts around and Replaces is arguably not required because of how the
  package works (although I don't really know what the interaction between
  Replaces and ucf is and would hesitate to say for certain whether
  Replaces is helpful here or not).  I saw Sam's argument that an
  uncoordinated transition here may be reasonable, and I don't have a
  strong opinion about this, although it also feels (at least to me) like
  the costs of not coordinating outweigh the costs of doing the
  coordination.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>