Package: debian-policy Version: 3.8.0.1 Severity: wishlist Hi Debian Policy maintainers,
It is the opinion of myself and Petter Reinholdtsen, maintainers of the sysvinit package, that the last sentence of §9.3.1 of policy is no longer relevant and should be removed: """Also, if the script name ends in .sh, the script will be sourced in runlevel S rather than being run in a forked subprocess, but will be explicitly run by sh in all other runlevels.""" The reasons for which it should be removed are: * /etc/init.d/rc has not supported this for an extremely long time, probably never, because the system would be unbootable due to .sh scripts calling 'exit' [0, 1]. * the reason why .sh scripts should be sourced is not clear. A popular theory is that it was an optimisation to avoid forking shells and reduce boot time [2]. It may have been an interface to allow scripts to "set an environment variable which would propogate through to subsequent scripts" [3]. These days, sourcing .sh scripts instead of executing them is not so much of an optimisation; we have a lightweight shell dash which can be used as /bin/sh and has been measured to improve boot time [4]. startpar has been hacked on to work better with the Debian boot system and we hope to use it for parrallel execution of initscripts in the future without contradicting policy (it a C program which uses execlp() to execute scripts). Passing enviroment variables around by sourcing .sh scripts is not a supported interface: .sh scripts have not been sourced for years and nobody has cared. * it would be nice to clean up /etc/init.d/rc in the absence of this requirement. Trying to support the sourcing of /etc/init.d/*.sh scripts makes the code much uglier to maintain. Thanks, Kel. [0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=339955#59 [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=339955#120 [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=339955#20 [3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=339955#15 [4] http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/bootcharts.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org