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.
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.
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.
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.