[Fedora-packaging] Re: Requires: initscripts?

[Bernard Johnson]

Matthias Saou wrote:
> Nope. The current guidelines don't mention anything about this AFAICT.
> It's the reviewer of my package who thinks it should be added, and had
> it confirmed by someone on IRC (which isn't something I'd consider
> trustworthy!).

Really, how can you say that.  You don't even know who weighed in on the
 discussion.  Surely you realize that a lot of people that are on this
list are on #fedora-devel as well.

But let me be clear with my position (I am the reviewer for anyone who
hasn't bothered to pull up the bug yet).  It is unclear for me whether
you think your program /doesn't need/ initscripts or /shouldn't require
initscripts/.  These are two totally different things, so I'll cover
them both.

Let's overlook the guideline for requiring the initscripts based on the
fact that you put files in it's directories - this will simplify things
for the moment.

You must ask yourself, "is my package fully functional if initscripts is
not installed".  The answer is no.  And not only no, but generates
errors.  Here's why:

1) . /etc/init.d/functions
This will fail with an error message.

2) daemon /usr/sbin/autodir ... cmdline opts
This will fail with an error message and fail to start the program.

3) pid=`pidfileofproc $prog`
This will fail with an error message and cause the initfile to give
incorrect status information.

4) killproc $prog
This will fail with an error message and also fail to shutdown the
program properly.

Now, given the above, I think we can agree that your program "needs"
initscripts (let's not say requires just yet).

You might now argue that initscript will always be installed so that
this is a non-issue.  With that argument you are probably assuming that
it will be required by the /installed/ kernel (this was my argument on
#fedora-devel, because I was arguing your side of the discussion).

So consider the case that someone compiles and runs their own kernel and
removes the fedora kernel from the system.  Until this was pointed out
to me, I did not know how few dependencies there were (at least in newer
fedora releases).  This is totally plausible.  And then if they remove
initscripts (because nothing else depends on it), your package is
broken.  This is why it should require initscripts.