Re: New Essential package procps-base

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Tue, 2023-11-14 at 17:29:01 +1100, Craig Small wrote:
> 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.

I'm all in for shrinking the essential-set. If there is consensus to
switch pidof implementations that also seems fine to me in the abstract.
But this shuffling around of essential-ness and new tiny packages and
stuff seems a bit unnecessary to me, more so when this increases the
bootstrapping-set. I'd also rather see instead a _proper_ transition to
get sysvinit-utils out of the essential-set, and then at some later
point procps can take over pidof.

Then there's the following, which I guess complicates things:

  $ dpkg -S bin/pidof | cut -d: -f2
   /bin/pidof

Also why is killall5 not a candidate too? In any case the pidof CLI
interface does not seem too big, so this does not feels urgent to me,
given the trade-offs.

> 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.

I think the status_of_proc function could be switched to use
start-stop-daemon (s-s-d) --status instead of pidofproc. To replace
pidof inside pidofproc I guess s-s-d could grow some option to print
the pid, I'd be happy to implement that. After doing a quick scan over
codesearch.debian.org, I notice that it looks like many current uses
of pidofproc should instead probably be using status_of_proc, and others
seem to just be fetching the pid to then perform some action that could
instead all be done directly with s-s-d.

Thanks,
Guillem