[sysvinit-devel] New stable packages available

[Jesse Smith]

I am happy to report there are new stable versions of SysV init,
startpar and insserv availale to download. This release was mostly
focused on minor bug fixes, cleaning up some code and fixing a few
documentation bugs. The only changes that happened between the beta and
the final release were for fixing a typo in the fstab-decode manual page
and avoiding multiple re-builds of insserv on Debian's build system.

There are a couple of significant changes which I feel are worth noting,
maybe with a WARNING, about the new behaviour:

1. I have imported the logsave program from e2fsprogs, This is the same
program as was available in the latest stable e2fsprogs release and it
does the same thing. The reason for the duplication is some downstream
scripts use the logsave program, but it is not available unless the
e2fsprogs package is installed. Since initscripts relies on logsave, I
imported it. (Not sure yet if it'll be dropped from e2fsprogs in the
future.) This means our version of logsave will overwrite any existing
one on the system, unless it is patched out of the Makefile. This should
have no practical effect as it is the same program, but worth noting
there is a potential over-write happening.

2. The halt command now passes "-h -P" to the shutdown command if "halt
-p" or "poweroff" is called on the command line. This causes shutdown to
set the INIT_HALT environment variable to "POWEROFF". This value is
often checked by shutdown scripts. And, in some cases, this may cause
shutdown behaviour to change when the "halt" or "poweroff" command is
used. In the past, calling halt did not set INIT_HALT and the system was
more likely to simply halt without powering off too.

That is it for major changes. The rest is minor bug fixes, some code
clean-up and performance improvements. Detailed changelogs follow.

The new packages can be downloaded from here:
http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/sysvinit/

Please file bug reports here:
https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=sysvinit

The change logs for the three packages are shown below:


SysV init 2.94
===============

    * When the halt command is called with the -p flag (or as poweroff)
      the command now passes the "-h -P" flags to shutdown. This
      in turn sets the INIT_HALT environment variable to POWEROFF.
      Assuming this value is checked by initscripts during the
      shutting down procedure, it should cause the system to
      be powered off.
      If halt is called without -p then the value of INIT_HALT
      is not set and the default action (often set in /etc/defaut/halt)
      is taken.
    * Removed unnecessary malloc.h includes. Memory allocation
      and freeing is now handled in stdlib.h
    * Added defines for FreeBSD to make some components compile
      on FreeBSD 11.
    * Increased the size of the kernel command line buffer in bootlogd
      from 256 characters to 4096. This size is defined in
KERNEL_COMMAND_LENGTH
      for easy modification downstream.
    * Added logsave.c and logsave.8 manual page from e2fsprogs to make
      sure logsave is available to initscripts.
    * Updated src/Makefile to make sure bootlogd compiles with Clang.
    * Use defined constants for password length in sulogin. Makes
      it easier to update/patch later.
    * Minor code fixes across multiple source files to avoid buffer
      overflows, or uninitialized strings.
    * Changed the way the "when" variable is used internally in shutdown.c.
      It starts as a NULL pointer, then might get set as a pointer to
optarg,
      then it might get set to point to an argv parameter, then it might
have
      a string value copied into it, over-writing the original data. We
should
      not risk over-writing internal variables which might get used for
something
      else (it's rude and security risk). Set up "when" as its own buffer
      that has data from optargs and/or argv copied into it.
    * Fixed typo in init.8 manual page.
    * Updated text of fstab-decode to explain what the utility does.
    

insserv 1.19.0
================

- Applied distro-independent patches from Debian to
  upstream code and manual page.
  Mostly introduces typo fixes and more flexible
  Makefile options.
  The following patches are no longer needed downstream:
  20_manpage_spelling
  21_tweak_warnings
  30_interactive_regexp_match
  92_m68k_alignment
  100_show
  130_crossbuild_fixes
  150_core_string_test
  160_manual_page_update
  170_undeclared_extension
  180_maxsymlinks

- Minor update to manual page to fix typo.
- Added patch from Dmitry Bogatov which makes communicating
  with D-bus optional at compile time. This feature is
  enabled by compiling with WANT_SYSTEMD defined.
- Migrated Debian testsuite into the "tests" directory.
- Fixed typo in warning messages.
- Cause Makefile to create link needed for testing in "tests"
  directory when building insserv. Running distclean removes
  link to avoid cluttering archive.
- Fixed pushd() and popd() functions to avoid terminating insserv
  if the current working directory is inaccessible.
  Fixes Debian bugs #573571 and #785687.
- Updated warning message insserv disables when an init.d script
  is not executable, to better indicate the script will not
  be enabled at boot/entering runlevel.
  Closes Debian bug 661314.
- Applied patch from Bloeslaw Tokarski which should improve
  performance of insserv in some cases by bypassing unnecessary
  some fadvise calls.
  Closes Debian bug #775912
- Updated manual page with format changes. Applied
  patch from Bjarni Ingi Gislason which closes Debian
  bug #919610
- Applied two new memory checks to avoid potential segfault.
- Print full path names when giving status updates on creating
  (or failing to create) files such as .depend.boot, .depend.start
  and .depend.stop.
  Addresses Debian bug #547609
- Minor fix to Makefile to make sure it cleans up after
  creating tarball.
- Added patch to make automated builds not require re-building source
  on Debian. (Patch provided by Helmut.)
  Closes Debian bug #922870

 
startpar 0.62
==============

* Fixed typos in startpar.c error messages.
  Moves Debian patch 99 upstream.
* Applied Debian patches 81_timeout and 83_hardening upstream.
* Minor code clean-up in makeboot.c to remove duplicate
  instructions.
* Added changelog to the tarball.