[sysvinit-devel] Second beta for insserv and startpar

[Jesse Smith]

Hello fellow initers.

I have uploaded two new beta packages to the Download area [1] today.
These new packages, insserv-1.20.0-beta2.tar.xz and
startpar-0.63-beta2.tar.xz, make some minor adjustments to the previous
beta releases which I'd like to get tested before the final versions
come out in June.

These betas are also the same as the ones previously mentioned here
about a week ago [2], with an important difference: the new location of
Makefile-style dependency data has been reverted.

When the initial beta packages were published they included a change to
move dependency information out of /etc/init.d/ to another location,
/var/lib/insserv/. A few issue reports had requested this and it had
been discussed a bit downstream. However, once the beta was published,
it got people talking about the location options again.

As it turns out, Petter was quite right: /var/lib/insserv is a poor
location as it may not be mounted at boot time. This could be worked
around by altering update-rc.d, but it seems that is not likely to
happen, at least not right away.

A few people suggested putting in the information under /lib, but this
seems to violate FHS more than keeping changing config files under /etc.

Someone suggested another path under /etc, but this would cause insserv
to incorrectly treat dependency information as initscripts.

In short, the best way forward seemed to be to take a step backward and
revert the changes. Keeping the dependency data under /etc/init.d/ has
worked for over a decade, it's familiar and it shouldn't (seriously)
violate FHS. In short, using /etc/init.d seems to be the lesser of evils.

All other changes listed in the first beta are still in place. Assuming
no new issues crop up, I plan to publish stable versions of sysvinit,
startpar and insserv around the end of June.

- Jesse

1. http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/sysvinit/

2. http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/sysvinit-devel/2019-05/msg00002.html