Bug#683654: lsb-base: some messages should be conditioned by $VERBOSE

[Teodor MICU <mteodor@gmail.com>]

2012/8/8 Didier 'OdyX' Raboud <odyx@debian.org>:
> Le jeudi, 2 août 2012 16.38:41, Teodor a écrit :
>> In Debian the recommendation for all init scripts is to check the variable
>> VERBOSE from /etc/default/rcS and only print a message on console only if
>> this variable is not 0.
>
> From the content of the debian-policy package, I don't think that's true; can
> you point me to where this recommendation comes from ?

I don't know about any written policy, but I suppose that a long
standing variable like VERBOSE should be somewhere. At least on rcS(5)
it says:

VERBOSE
  Setting  this  option  to  no (in lower case) will make the boot
  process a bit less verbose.  Setting this  option  to  yes  will
  make the boot process a bit more verbose.

I've only seen this recommendation in /etc/init.d/skeleton:

# Description:       This file should be used to construct scripts to be
#                    placed in /etc/init.d.

>> This should be adopted by init-functions too, at least for some of the
>> functions that print [info] tags.
>
> As only the init scripts themselves can know which of the messages handed to
> the log_msg_* functions are important or not, I think the responsability of
> handling an eventual VERBOSE variable is upon the individual iniscripts and
> not upon lsb-base.

I've seen a big difference between «sysvinit» and «systemd» with
"quiet" on the cmdline. I think that "quiet" will make VERBOSE=no at
boot and shutdown, but if so many init scripts do not check this
setting we see too much messages at boot. That's why I thought a first
step would be to add a check for log_msg_* functions that print [info]
messages.

Cheers