[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#380602: initscripts: possibility for init to fail when $CONCURRENCY is lies

[Nigel McNie]

Package: initscripts
Version: 2.86.ds1-15
Severity: normal

I noticed this problem when I upgraded initscripts to a particular NMU
recently, although I'm not sure whether it was the upgrade that caused
it (I think the version was 2.86.ds1-14.2).

If /etc/default/rc has a value for $CONCURRENCY that is not one of
"none", "shell" or "startpar", then the case statement in /etc/init.d/rc
that defines the startup() bash function will not create any bash
function at all. Then elsewhere in the script where startup should be
called, init just complains that the function was not found. Thus things all
go downhill (you can imagine what your system would be like with no
initscripts having been run - read only filesystem etc, I fixed it by
rebooting and modifying my kernel command line to mount my root partition
as read-write so I could hack in the /etc/default/rc file).

I noticed this because the value for CONCURRENCY was set to "no" instead
of "none" in /etc/default/rc. Again, I'm not sure if it was the NMU that
caused that or whether I'd done it myself, but either way it shows how
one simple typo can cause relatively large effects...

My suggestion for fixing is to shunt some of that code in /etc/init.d/rc
around so that if the value for $CONCURRENCY is not one of "none",
"shell" or "startpar", then log some kind of warning and use the "none"
startup function.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.17.060626
Locale: LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_NZ.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages initscripts depends on:
ii  debianutils                   2.17       Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  e2fsprogs                     1.39-1     ext2 file system utilities and lib
ii  libc6                         2.3.6-16   GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  lsb-base                      3.1-10     Linux Standard Base 3.1 init scrip
ii  mount                         2.12r-10   Tools for mounting and manipulatin

initscripts recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information