Hello, On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 05:29:01PM +1100, Craig Small wrote: > Hello, > For quite some time (since 2006!) there has been a discussion at[1] about > changing from the sysvinit-utils version of pidof to the procps one. A > quick scan of the various distributions shows that only Debian and Ubuntu > (and I assume most other downstreams) use the sysvinit-utils version.
I support using procps implementation in Debian, to align us with the rest of the world. > > So to rehash some old drafts, here's the proposal. > > What: > Create a new package procps-base. This uses the existing procps source > package and just enable building of pidof. procps-base will be an Essential > package and only contain pidof. I however do not think pidof needs to be part of the Essential set. Instead I think pidof can just be part of procps package. The sysvinit-utils package will then pull in procps via a dependency (once sysvinit-utils stops being Essential), which would smooth the transition for all sysvinit users until LSB pidofproc has been implemented in all init scripts. > > Why: > This would bring the pidof variant in line with other distributions. > sysvinit-utils would no longer need to be Essential (though that's a > separate issue) and would only have init-d-script, fstab-decode, and > killall5. > > The majority of usage of pidof is in init or pre/post scripts, which really > should be using the LSB pidofproc function. That function in turn > optionally uses pidof if the pidfile parameter is not given. That's > probably a way forward for sometime in the future to not need procps-base > Essential, but it is a way off. Additionally most uses of pidof is `if pidof [...]; then` which will expand to false/else when the pidof command is not available (which it should be on all "normal" systems, as procps is already Priority important). A number of years ago I tested booting a regular debootstrapped system (with all priority important packages, etc) with sysvinit-utils excluded and that did not show a single warning about missing pidof. Someone might want to repeat that experiment. > > sysvinit-utils requires only libc6 while procps-base require libproc-2 but > this is the same library used for the ps,top,w etc tools which are > installed on most systems. > > > 1: https://bugs.debian.org/810018 Regards, Andreas Henriksson
