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Future of update-rc.d in wheezy+1

June 27th, 2012 - 05:20 am ET by Roger Leigh | Report spam
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Hi folks,

I'd just like to briefly discuss potential plans for update-rc.d
in wheezy+1, and how this might impact on file-rc and sysv-rc.

sysv-rc has defaulted to using LSB header dependencies and insserv
for a few years now. The last few releases require you to enable
insserv to upgrade, and the pending upload just does this
automatically. The result is that all wheezy users of sysv-rc
will be using dependency-based boot.

This means that the runlevels and sequence numbers passed as
arguments to update-rc.d will never be used; they will just get
silently discarded. The main problem as I see it is that these
numbers are going to bitrot badly--they aren't being tested, while
the dependency information in the header is being used by everyone.

I'd like to suggest that we do the following in sysv-rc update-rc.d:
- wheezy: silently drop start|stop sequence numbers and runlevels
(this is already the case when using insserv, and we can remove the
non-insserv codepaths)
- wheezy+1: warn if these options are used
- wheezy+2: remove support for the options and error out if used
And additionally, to add lintian warnings for use of these options,
including when using dh_installinit.

The main problem that I can see is file-rc is currently still
dependent upon the sequence numbers and runlevel information. Would
it be possible for file-rc to also add support for dependencies?
Given that the static boot ordering is quite dead at this point, it
would be very helpful to know what's possible here. Could it use
insserv to do the dependency graph and then just consume the
makefile-style dependency list?


Regards,
Roger

.''`. Roger Leigh
: :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
`. `' schroot and sbuild http://alioth.debian.org/projects/buildd-tools
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#1 Petter Reinholdtsen
June 27th, 2012 - 05:30 am ET | Report spam
[Roger Leigh]
Could [file-rc] use insserv to do the dependency graph and then just
consume the makefile-style dependency list?



Yes. See <URL: http://bugs.debian.org/539591 >,
<URL: http://bugs.debian.org/573004 > and the source of insserv, where
a patch to do this was created and included by Kel. The patch has
been available for more than two years.

Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen


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#2 Paul Wise
June 27th, 2012 - 09:30 am ET | Report spam
On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:

Yes.  See <URL: http://bugs.debian.org/539591 >,
<URL: http://bugs.debian.org/573004 > and the source of insserv, where
a patch to do this was created and included by Kel.  The patch has
been available for more than two years.



Hmm, no upload in those two years either. Is file-rc still maintained at all?

bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise


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#3 Alexander Wirt
June 27th, 2012 - 10:00 am ET | Report spam
On Wed, 27 Jun 2012, Paul Wise wrote:

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:

> Yes.  See <URL: http://bugs.debian.org/539591 >,
> <URL: http://bugs.debian.org/573004 > and the source of insserv, where
> a patch to do this was created and included by Kel.  The patch has
> been available for more than two years.

Hmm, no upload in those two years either. Is file-rc still maintained at all?


It is. But more or less in "no-new-features" mode.

Implementing the insserv stuff is wishlist for me. Even when I now get forced
into it.

Alex


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#4 Bernd Zeimetz
June 27th, 2012 - 10:50 am ET | Report spam
On 06/27/2012 03:46 PM, Alexander Wirt wrote:
On Wed, 27 Jun 2012, Paul Wise wrote:

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:

Yes. See <URL: http://bugs.debian.org/539591 >,
<URL: http://bugs.debian.org/573004 > and the source of insserv, where
a patch to do this was created and included by Kel. The patch has
been available for more than two years.



Hmm, no upload in those two years either. Is file-rc still maintained at all?


It is. But more or less in "no-new-features" mode.

Implementing the insserv stuff is wishlist for me. Even when I now get forced
into it.



So might be this could avoided if we switch to something more modern
like openrc as discussed some weeks ago here - I think the main reason
file-rc edxists is because its much more easy to maintain than all the
other crap^Winit systems (including insserv) floating around.


Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer
http://bzed.de http://www.debian.org
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#5 Roger Leigh
June 27th, 2012 - 06:00 pm ET | Report spam
On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 04:39:38PM +0200, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
On 06/27/2012 03:46 PM, Alexander Wirt wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jun 2012, Paul Wise wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>>
>>> Yes. See <URL: http://bugs.debian.org/539591 >,
>>> <URL: http://bugs.debian.org/573004 > and the source of insserv, where
>>> a patch to do this was created and included by Kel. The patch has
>>> been available for more than two years.
>>
>> Hmm, no upload in those two years either. Is file-rc still maintained at all?
> It is. But more or less in "no-new-features" mode.
>
> Implementing the insserv stuff is wishlist for me. Even when I now get
> forced into it.



I don't think there's any question of "forcing", but encouraging
file-rc to retain compatibility with the init scripts being used by the
distribution. It looks like the patches are there, they just need
testing. If file-rc could have this in place for wheezy, that would
be highly desirable, so that we can work on deprecating runlevel
sequence numbers in wheezy+1.

So might be this could avoided if we switch to something more modern
like openrc as discussed some weeks ago here - I think the main reason
file-rc edxists is because its much more easy to maintain than all the
other crap^Winit systems (including insserv) floating around.



The openrc runscript format is certainly a bit nicer than the LSB
header, but at the same time has some disadvantages. With the LSB
header/insserv setup, we can read all the headers and have a
dependency graph for all the scripts. But when you run a script by
hand, or with invoke-rc.d, it can't satisfy dependencies at that
point--it's only at the level of /etc/init.d/rc for runlevel changes.
OpenRC OTOH has no global view but can resolve dependencies
iteratively when running a script directly. Having both would be
nice, which is what systemd/upstart give us.

I'm still following OpenRC stuff, though I've not had time to get
involved directly yet. The main point preventing us adopting it is
lack of support for LSB dependencies, which would make upgrades
rather painful. We could possibly address this by autogeneration of
runscript wrappers for LSB scripts. Ideally, I'd like for OpenRC to
gain a high level dependency graph view of the system, but it doesn't
look like this is a design that would be particularly popular with
OpenRC upstream.


Regards,
Roger

.''`. Roger Leigh
: :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
`. `' schroot and sbuild http://alioth.debian.org/projects/buildd-tools
`- GPG Public Key F33D 281D 470A B443 6756 147C 07B3 C8BC 4083 E800


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