Debian Bug report logs - #1037496
show note about missing boot integration for non-systemd

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Mark Hindley <leepen@debian.org>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>

Subject: mdadm: Please restore support for use without systemd as PID 1

Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2023 13:28:17 +0100

Source: mdadm
Version: 4.2+20230227-1
Severity: normal

Dear Daniel,

SysV initscripts and cron jobs have recently been removed from mdadm.  It would
be a great help to users of non-systemd inits if you could restore them. Service
files and initscripts can happily coexist and systemd will use the available
service files in preference.

Installing recent mdadm on a non-systemd system can render the system
unbootable.

Thanks for you consideration.

Mark


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.0
merged-usr: no
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-9-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)

Message #10 received at 1037496@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Daniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>

To: Mark Hindley <leepen@debian.org>

Cc: 1037496@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#1037496: mdadm: Please restore support for use without systemd as PID 1

Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2023 15:32:23 +0200

retitle 1037496 show note about missing boot integration for non-systemd
thanks

Hi Mark,

On 6/13/23 14:28, Mark Hindley wrote:
> It would be a great help to users of non-systemd inits if you could restore them.

thanks you for your report.

Personally I'm using systemd, but in general I fully agree that as long
as it's no "burden" to keep the sysvinit scripts around, I'd keep them.

For mdadm specifically, using sysvinit scripts has been the source of a
bunch of bugs as some things are not properly supportable when it comes
to events/race-condition handling when detecting raid devices in early boot.

Most other distributions as well as upstream don't support sysvinit
anymore in mdadm. I can see at least three disadvantages for keeping
sysvinit scripts in mdadm around:

  * I would need to support them in Debian for a type of system I
    don't use anywhere anymore since several Debian releases.
    Personally, I'd rather spend time on, to me, more appealing things.

  * Keeping sysvinit support for mdadm in Debian de-facto makes me
    upstream for these scripts, which doesn't seem right given that
    I don't use it myself.

  * Keeping sysvinit support would "falsly advertise" that it's actually
    maintained and cared for, which isn't the case and I'd expect that
    a lot of bugs don't get spottet in time for a next Debian release.

As of policy 4.5.0, including sysvinit scripts in a package if systemd
units are present, is not longer recommended but optional, so that (at
least after the bookworm release last weekend) I'd expect that a lot of
other packages are going to drop the sysvinit scripts too.

A solution could be for those that like to keep using sysvinit, to
submit the scripts for inclusion in the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package
and maintain it there.

> Installing recent mdadm on a non-systemd system can render the system
> unbootable.

Good point, I'll think about emitting an appropriate message so that
it's not easily overseen in such situtations.

Regards,
Daniel

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