Please help with checking the boot and shutdown script ordering

Petter Reinholdtsen pere at hungry.com
Mon Sep 21 13:59:55 UTC 2009


As was announced earlier, Squeeze will be using dependency based boot
sequencing to order the init.d scripts.  The current dependencies are
fairly good, but work is still needed to weed out the last bugs in the
ordering.  Automatic systems are in place to detect the most grave
problems and inconsistencies, but to detect missing or incorrect
dependencies, someone that know each script and package need to be
involved.  This is where you come in. :)

The current effort is coordinated on IRC (#pkg-sysvinit on
irc.debian.org) and the mailing list
initscripts-ng-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org.  The wiki page
<URL: http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot > link
to related resources.

One new resource is an archive wide check of the consistency of
dependencies available from <URL:http://lintian.debian.org/~pere/>.
In the log file available from there, one can currently see how all
scripts in the archive will be ordered in each rc?.d/ directory, and
also see bugs and inconsistencies detected.  Examples of such are
scripts depending on non-existing services, scripts starting in rcS.d/
depending on $syslog which is started in rc2.d/, etc.

Another new resource is piuparts, which will detect packages with
inconsistency between the package dependency and the init.d script
dependency - like a script requiring $portmap while the package do not
depend on portmap.

Please help find and fix errors in the init.d script ordering.  The
majority of packages are fairly correct, and I have tested the
packages installed by tasksel to verify that the common setup is
correct, but some lesser used packages might have incorrect order and
only manual review can discover this.

For sequential booting, the dependencies only need to be fairly
correct to get a useful order, but for concurrent booting the
dependencies need to be complete to avoid surprises.

If you want to help out and wonder what to look for in the headers or
in the log files generated by the automatic checking systems, please
ask on IRC. :)

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen



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