Is $syslog a Required-Start or a Should-Start?

[Sven Joachim]

On 2009-08-04 17:37 +0200, Frédéric Brière wrote:

> Following the insserv "flipping of the switch" last week, I noticed that
> several init scripts on my system were lacking a dependency on $syslog.
> (The debhelper sample init script is lacking such a dependency, and I
> suspect many maintainers copied it w/o too much thought.)
>
> Before filing bug reports, I'd like to know whether $syslog should be a
> Required-Start or a Should-Start.  While most init scripts (and the
> example on wiki.debian.org) specify the former, some scripts opt for the
> latter, which seems to make sense given how packages typically don't
> depend on system-log-daemon anyway.  Is there a definitive answer on
> this matter?

I cannot claim to give a definitive answer, but I'm 99.9% sure that you
have to use Should-Start if you do not depend on the other service to be
installed.  If you use Required-Start, insserv will choke if the
required service is not available.  See #538948¹ for instance.

Sven

¹ http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=538948