[systemd-devel] RFC: removing initctl support

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Lennart Poettering:
> We already declared the interface "obsolete" in the docs, which makes me
> particularly keen on dropping it...

You've heard from the Debian systemd maintainers. You haven't heard from
the Debian sysvinit maintainers. Their subtly different position on
/run/initctl, exemplified by Roger Leigh (one of those maintainers) writing in
2012, is this:

> The protocol is private and undocumented, so there should be
> no third-party users. The location is hard-coded directly into the
> binaries and is likely only intended to be used by sysvinit
> binaries. systemd is an exception to this rule, and I would
> suspect the only one.
-- https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=657990#57

M. Leigh's suspicion is wrong today, however. The nosh package and Joachim
Nilsson's finit both also have compatibility shims that listen on /dev/initctl
or /run/initctl .  See http://superuser.com/a/888936/38062 for more information.