Craig, Many thanks for the time and effort you have invested in this.
On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 10:09:38PM +1100, Craig Small wrote: > On Tue, 13 Jan 2026 at 22:04, Luca Boccassi <[email protected]> wrote: > > The second point is correct > > Excellent, so a systemd init host doesn't need pidof then Really? Pidof is used in some maintainer scripts. See dbus[1], for example. Surely pidof remains Essential until all such usages are identified and Depends: whatever-pidof-provider added? I think it is also worth considering that the 2 pidof implementations are not completely identical. A brief comparison of the manpages suggests that the separator option is different (-d vs -S) and some of the other options only exist in 1 or other implementation. If they are not direct drop-in replacements, how do we avoid/handle breakage for callers/users? Please be assured that I am not averse to finding a solution to this, but it is a difficult issue requiring considerable work for pretty marginal gains. At the moment, I don't see just removing Essential: yes from sysvinit-utils, shipping pidof from src:procps' and adding the usual Breaks/Replaces as being a complete and adequate transition plan. With best wishes Mark [1] https://sources.debian.org/src/dbus/1.16.2-2/debian/dbus.postinst#L46
