Bug#760189: kpartx: systemd "NEWS" still in new version

[Philip Hands]

Package: kpartx
Version: 0.5.0-6+deb8u1
Followup-For: Bug #760189

Dear Ritesh,

When upgrading to Jessie today I was somewhat surprised that I
apparently had multipath-tools installed, and that it didn't support
systemd (as told to me by apt-listchanges).

Of course neither of these things turn out to be true.

Looking at git, I see that your "fix"[1] was to replace one news item,
while leaving a similarly useless systemd news item, which only made any
sense if read in the context of the first item anyway, since it's about
the removal of the functionality that the previous news announced.

Taking a closer look at the text of the NEWS, we have:

> The systemd support has been dropped

That is only true if one knows this bit from the old NEWS:

> - In this release, we ship the upstream systemd service ...

but that's not there any more.

Relative to the version I was upgrading from nothing has been dropped.

Then we get:

> Device Mapper multipath is a core component in the SAN Stack.

which to me sounds like "this package is vital to your system's ability
to find it's disks.", which may be true if one uses multipath-tools, but
not if one's using kpartx to very occasionally look at the partitions in
LVs that contain VM's boot partitions, as is the case for me (and I'd
imagine many other kpartx users).

> The flexibility provided by shell init scripts were flexible.  With
> systemd, it is not the same anymore.  We sure can create shell scripts
> and pass it to systemd to run, but then it forfeits the philosophy of
> systemd that "shell is evil".

This seems like childish name-calling to me -- why on earth would our
users want to read this tosh?

> So rather that passing shell units to systemd, we'll let systemd run
> this service in SysV compatibility mode.

and finally you conclude that in fact, this package (that the user isn't
even necessarily installing), does in fact support systemd perfectly well after all.

This strikes me as pretty unhelpful, even for the people who are using
the multipath-utils package.

The fact that you allowed this to remain, and tried to close the bug is
bizarre.

Please actually fix the bug this time -- preferably by removing the NEWS
relating to systemd completely, or if you're going to try to claim that
there is anything newsworthy here at all, by making sure that the
  http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-lvm/multipath-tools.git/diff/debian/?id=828c4a0d463ceefc2192f522b6a20fdf7e4d0b28&context=20&ignorews=0&ss=0

version of NEWS included in kpartx does not include this stuff, or
failing that, has a very prominent notice about the news not applying to
kpartx.

Cheers, Phil.

[1] Here's the change, also showing the remaining news item:

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.1
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages kpartx depends on:
ii  dmsetup             2:1.02.90-2.2
ii  libc6               2.19-18
ii  libdevmapper1.02.1  2:1.02.90-2.2
ii  udev                215-17+deb8u1

kpartx recommends no packages.

kpartx suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information