Bug#835520: Policy 9.3.1 is inaccurate to the point of being harmful

[Sam Hartman]

package: debian-policy
severity: normal

Hi. As part of reviewing an issue for the technical committee, I just
read policy section 9.3 in its entirety.

Section 9.3.1 really seems to be showing its age.  That section covers
runlevels and the sequencing numbers after S and K in rc.d links without
reference to dependency-based boot ordering, init systems other than
sysinit, etc.


In an ideal world I'd encourage that section to be updated to talk about
how boot ordering works on modern Debian.
Absent that, I'd recommend significantly trimming the section to just
cover the fact that there are run levels and that there are these
numbers after S and K and not go into what the numbers after S and K
mean.

Bug#835490: debian-policy: remove references to upstart

[Ansgar Burchardt]

Package: debian-policy
Severity: normal

Upstart is no longer part of Debian[1] nor actively maintained
upstream.  Policy should drop references to it as an alternative init
system.

I've attached a patch to remove section 9.11.1 (actually to replace it
with an empty stub to ensure there is no section 9.11.1 with different
contents in the future).

Ansgar

  [1] 
diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
index 9cd182b..3c75da9 100644
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -8553,47 +8553,8 @@ exec /usr/lib/foo/foo "$@"
   scripts and may not have a one-to-one correspondence with the init
   scripts.
 
-
-  Event-based boot with upstart
-
-	  
-Packages may integrate with the upstart event-based
-boot system by installing job files in the
-/etc/init directory.  SysV init scripts for which
-an equivalent upstart job is available must query the output of
-the command initctl version for the string
-upstart and avoid running in favor of the native
-upstart job, using a test such as this:
-	
-if [ "$1" = start ] && which initctl >/dev/null && initctl version | grep -q upstart
-then
-	exit 1
-fi
-	
-  
-  
-Because packages shipping upstart jobs may be installed on
-systems that are not using upstart, maintainer scripts must
-still use the common update-rc.d and
-invoke-rc.d interfaces for configuring runlevels
-and for starting and stopping services.  These maintainer
-scripts must not call the upstart start,
-restart, reload, or stop
-interfaces directly.  Instead, implementations of
-invoke-rc.d must detect when upstart is running and
-when an upstart job with the same name as an init script is
-present, and perform the requested action using the upstart job
-instead of the init script.
-  
-  
-Dependency-based boot managers for SysV init scripts, such as
-startpar, may avoid running a given init script
-entirely when an equivalent upstart job is present, to avoid
-unnecessary forking of no-op init scripts.  In this case, the
-boot manager should integrate with upstart to detect when the
-upstart job in question is started or stopped to know when the
-dependency has been satisfied.
-  
+
+  (removed)