Hello! This information is not directly related to procps, but it is kind of related to the reason why we'd want to introduce procps-base as there's no big point in doing it if we can't also make sysvinit-utils non-essential. Also we don't really have a good tracking bug so posting here to archive the information somewhere before I forget about it....
I've looked closer at the users of /lib/init/init-d-script which was mentioned in a previous post that some packages init script unconditionally sources. Apparently "new school" init scripts as generated by current dh-make and as visible in /etc/init.d/skeleton is the reason for these unconditional sourcing of the file which causes problems if we downgrade sysvinit-utils (which ships /lib/init/init-d-script) to non-essential. Given this style of init script is apparently the currently recommended form, I assume we can see the number of packages using it rise over time... The problem should be (partially?) less problematic if the package using "new school" init script also ships a native systemd unit file, which should avoid the init script being executed at all... (Though some people still manually execute init scripts even under systemd out of old habits and this only works because systemd ships an LSB hook that catches this and issues systemctl seamlessly.) a) packages shipping an init script that uses /lib/init/init-d-script according to codesearch.d.n b) if it's not a big practical issue, because the init script will not be used under systemd. pkg has masking systemd unit file ======================================================================== sddm yes coquelicot yes open-iscsi yes graphite-api yes apache2 no! (only partial snippet to extend autoconverted script) batmand yes netplan no! (but carries own fallback copy of init-d-script!) courier-authdaemon yes uwsgi-emperor no! opendnssec-signer yes kxd yes lvm2 yes waagent yes prometheus yes dbab yes (also carries own fallback copy of init-d-script!) prometheus-pgbouncer-exporter yes shairport-sync yes freeipmi-ipmiseld no! knot-resolver yes prometheus-mysqld-exporter yes hhvm yes prometheus-pushgateway no! courier-mta yes prometheus-node-exporter no! The investigation was done using (so might very well be incomplete): for pkg in .... ; do apt-file show $pkg | grep -e 'init.d' -e 'systemd/system' done TODO: Investigate what happens if executing such an init script directly under systemd where normally systemd-installed LSB hooks would override it and use systemctl... Regards, Andreas Henriksson