Re: Bug#810018: New Essential package procps-base

[Craig Small <csmall@debian.org>]

Hi Debian Release Team,

I released probably the best way of knowing if "we have the time" or not is to ask you.

So what is this change?

It is replacing the pidof in sysv-init-utils with the pidof in procps.

This will involve making a new Essential package procps-base which will only have pidof statically linked (to not pull in libproc-2).

Then sysv-init-utils would remove pidof and not be marked Essential.

There is some talk of in the long-run making packages needing pidof to depend on it, but that is a while off and I'm not sure its possible.

 - Craig

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Craig Small <csmall@debian.org>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2025 at 20:24
Subject: Re: Bug#810018: New Essential package procps-base
To: Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org>
Cc: <810018@bugs.debian.org>

On Thu, 20 Feb 2025 at 21:07, Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org> wrote:

On Thu, 20 Feb 2025 at 09:26, Craig Small <csmall@debian.org> wrote:
- src:procps with a new procps-pidof binary package that
breaks/replaces current sysvinit-utils and with prio: essential
- drop pidof and prio:essential from sysvinit-utils and add depends on
procps-pidof

There's also the case that packages that have an implicit dependency on sysvinit-utils will have an explicit one.

pidof would ideally be built statically, so not to pull in libprocps.

There was also the issue about init scripts sourcing init-d-script. systemd unit files don't need this but there are still quite a few like this.

pidof is also a symlink to killall5, I assume replaces works with them but not 100% sure.

Probably the biggest problem is Trixie freeze, its about 3 weeks away. There was a discussion about this change a while ago, but I'm not sure if we can make it this time or best to wait until after Trixie.

 - Craig

 

Shouldn't this work?