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
