[arch-dev-public] Silent removal of initscripts?

[Tom Gundersen]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 4:46 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know we posted a news item back in November about the deprecation of
> old school rc.d scripts, but the current silent removal thing is not
> real cool, and one never knows what package is going to fail to start
> up next. Last week it was openvpn, today it appears samba has lost its
> script.

As there has been no announcement of anyone taking responsibility for
the rc scripts, I'd assume that anyone still using them are basically
on their own now.

> We should post a news item saying "scripts are disappearing as of now,
> please be aware", as any machine booted remotely gives absolutely zero
> indication that some service startup failed until you try to actually
> use the service.

Makes sense.

> Also, rumor has it a community package exists to
> catalog these old rc.d scripts once they are removed, but `pacman -Ss
> initscripts` and `pacman -Ss rc.d` found me nothing. Giving our users
> (and hell, other developers) at least a bit of heads up would be
> awesome here.

I know Lukas intended to do something along these lines, and indeed
there is a repository [0], but apparently it is not shipped as a
package (yet?).

Lukas, what is your plan with this? It would be good to know if and
how you intend to deal with this stuff and include it in the
announcement.

IMNSHO, it would probably be best to just unequivocally declare the rc
scripts as dead and unsupported rather than try to play catch-up now.
Official rc scripts support is really something we should have
discussed and planned in December, not a month after things stopped
working...

Cheers,

Tom

[0]: <https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/sysvinit-scripts/trunk>.