Idea for migrating packages away from static boot sequence numbers

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

At the moment package maintainers need to both come up with a static
boot sequence number (or use the default of 20/20) when registring
init.d scrints in the package postinst, and provide correct
dependencies in the init.d scripts to calculate the sequence numbers
automatically at install time.

Some maintainers would like to have the choice of dropping the static
sequence numbers, and an idea was mentioned on IRC on how to do this.

We could introduce a new argument to update-rc.d, say lsb-depend, and
package maintainers who want to choose away the static sequence number
way of ordering boot scripts, can call update-rc.d like this:

  update-rc.d scriptname lsb-depend

and let the package depend on newer versions of sysv-rc or some
virtual dependency provided by newer sysv-rc (say sysv-lsb-depend).
The update-rc.d call would then fail if dependency based boot
sequencing is not enabled, and the package in question would fail to
install before the computer is using dependency based boot sequencing.

This way the package maintainer get a choice if they want to keep
supporting the error prone static boot sequence numbers, or switch
their package to only work with dependency based boot sequencing.

I do not believe we should implement this right now, but it might be a
good way forward some time in the future.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen