I tried to install sysvinit-2.59-2.deb, but dpkg complained it was too old and I should upgrade it first. I grabbed dpkg 1.1.3 from the unstable tree and it installed fine. I now have two questions: is it reliable? Second, shouldn't it be ELF? I'm glad it's a.out :-)
I had links in /etc/rc[2-5].d stopping and restarting the same daemons at the same runlevel created by the standard installation. I had noticed but forgot to remove them, and the new dpkg discovered it, and offered to remove the kill links. Congratulations I. Jackson! Then I tried to install sysvinit-2.59-2.deb, and dpkg said I needed libc5. I concluded that the .deb was made for ELF, grabbed the source and compiled it myself. Then I made the .deb using the supplied debian.rules, which worked fine. I just remark that dpkg aborted complaining that the post-pre-inst needed the right permissions. More kudos to dpkg, the ones in debian-tmp had mode 700 because they were simply copied from the untarred files, and the tar was created with a restrictive umask. I proceeded to install my sysvinit-2.59-2.deb but dpkg still complained about libc5. I had to edit the control file directly to remove that line. This however still didn't work, because dpkg then stopped complaining that it couldn't overwrite mesg because it came from bsdutils. *SIGH* I removed mesg by hand and edited the bsdutils.list, and sysvinit-2.59-2.deb finally installed. This reminds me of the time I used slackware and had to edit the distribution files directly :-(... On the other hand, the installation of sysvinit-2.59-2 is nice, offering to upgrade the config files and backing up the old ones only when they differ. The new init even works :-) Carlos
