How packages should supply dependency information

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Olivier Sessink]
> does that mean that the parallel boot executable that I previously
> posted to this list (parallel as in all processes with the same
> order number are executed simultaneously) will still work and speed
> up boot time?

It will still work, yes.  You will have to measure for yourself if it
will speed up the boot time, but I suspect it will do so too. :)

There is nothing magic about the insserv package.  It can reorder the
symlinks in /etc/rc#.d/, and also create a makefile-like dependency
list for use by the startpar program (not yet working properly), based
on the provided dependency information.

My current focus is getting the init.d script dependencies documented,
to make it possible to verify the current boot order (I know there are
bugs, and would like to find them all. :), and as a nice side effect,
we get the option of reordering the boot sequence based on this
dependency information to both correct the boot order and to speed up
the boot using parallel boot options.

And the people most capable of documenting the dependencies are the
package maintainers, so I hope all maintainers with init.d scripts in
their packages will add dependency information in their scripts,
preferably using the LSB init.d format.

I do not want to make yet another format to specify this information,
because I believe it is better to use the standards we have available
when they are usable, instead of increasing confusion and
inconsistency by coming up with a new format.  A new format might be
arguably better, perhaps even perfect, but if we can avoid increased
confusion I would stick with the standard that is good enough. :)