Please help me make athcool compatible with dependency-based init systems (was: Release Update: freeze, architecture requalification)

[Nicolas Boullis]

Hi,

As a follow-up to myself, and as suggested by Kel Modderman, please also 
CC replies to the developer list for initscripts-ng. (Full message kept 
for those people.)


On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 11:33:10PM +0200, Nicolas Boullis wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Disclaimer: I've been pretty busy recently, not giving my Debian 
> packages the care and love they deserve. That's why I'm now asking for 
> help, somewhat late...
> 
> On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 03:35:35PM +0200, Luk Claes wrote:
> > 
> > * Prepare init.d-Scripts for dependency-based init systems
> > 
> > Wider testing of dependency-based init systems has lead to some new bugs
> > for this goal, but the current state looks quite well. We are confident
> > that we will have full support for dep-based init system in lenny.
> 
> One of my packages, namely athcool installs an init script that is not 
> yet compatible with dependency-based init systems. For some reason, it 
> was not detected by automatic systems such as lintian, and no bug was 
> filed against it, and no-one cared about it yet.
> 
> Athcool installs an init script but does not install links to run it on 
> boot, and that might be the reason why lintian did not notice about it. 
> (No startup link is installed because athcool causes bad stability 
> issues on some systems. If one tests it and experiences such problems, 
> the system is back to a normal state after a reboot.) Someone who is 
> satisfied with athcool can run update-rc.d (as documented in 
> /usr/share/doc/athcool/README.Debian) to enable startup links.
> 
> I'd like to reproduce a similar behaviour with the headers for 
> dependency-based init systems, but I know close to nothing about such 
> systems. I read the corresponding section of the LSB, but it did not 
> help me much. I guess I could set Default-Start and Default-Stop empty. 
> But then I have no idea how I would document the enablement of startup 
> links by the user. Since those keywords are called "Default", I guess 
> there is a way to override them, but how? Or I think one might change 
> the Default-Start and Default-Stop keyworks, but then who would they ask 
> the system to take the change into account?
> 
> Any help is welcome, especially as a patch or a NMU, but please don't 
> forget the documentation issue.
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Nicolas
> 
> 
> PS: I have no time to read d-devel; please CC replies to me.