Hello Carsten Hey, On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 01:19:26AM +0100, Carsten Hey wrote: > Package: sysvinit-utils > Severity: wishlist > > > * Ted Ts'o [2011-03-26 19:07 -0400]: [...] > > Another binary which is used by other packages includes the logsave > > utility, which is also in e2fsprogs, and which is used by > > /etc/init.d/checkfs.sh and /etc/init.d/checkroot.sh in the initscripts > > package. > > Debian supports (or rather will probably support) three init systems: > > * systemd does not use logsave to save the fsck log if /var/log is not > mounted yet, but instead "just pipes the stdout of fsck to syslog > which ends up in dmesg if syslog is not yet running" (thanks to > whoever explained this in #systemd). > > * sysvinit and upstart depend on the package initscripts, which depends > on sysvinit-utils. > > > logsave does not use any libraries except libc. Provided that Ted Ts'o > agrees, please consider moving logsave to sysvinit-utils.
>From my investigations I can see that logsave command seems to only be used in 'initramfs-tools' and 'sysvinit' (initscripts). If e2fsprogs becomes non-essential as discussed in #474540 these two users could simply add a dependency on e2fsprogs. I don't see the point in moving the utility over to sysvinit-utils, specially since that package is also under discussion to be made non-essential (see #851747). Another way to view it is to investigate if these two couldn't just stop using logsave. The code in initramfs-tools and sysvinit is basically identical. For initramfs-tools the fsck log is saved in /run which should already be mounted at the time of running fsck, so I guess it could simply be replaced with appending "> $FSCK_LOGFILE 2>&1". For sysvinit it saves to /var/log/fsck/... since sysvinit hasn't kept up with the changes that has been made on the initramfs-tools (and systemd) side. If checkroot and checkfs files where updated to match initramfs-tools (FSCK_LOGFILE pointing to /run) then I guess logsave could be avoided in sysvinit as well. Since initscripts (src:sysvinit) is not part of a default install anymore and if you do switch over to sysvinit-core you likely also want e2fsprogs anyway I don't see how a dependency would hurt. For initramfs-tools the situation is that it's already not part of a "minimal" (debootstrap --variant=minbase) install which would be the recommended one for containers, etc. For the "normal install" case initramfs-tools will be installed but then you very likely also want e2fsprogs installed anyway so I don't see how a dependency would hurt there either. Note: even if e2fsprogs drops Essential flag it would still be part of default installs (even minimal installs unless it's priority is lowered to 'important' instead of 'required'). Given this I would suggest tagging this bug report 'wontfix' and closing it. Do you see anything I've missed? Regards, Andreas Henriksson
