[sysvinit-devel] Removing legacy distro support?

[Jesse Smith]

I was going through some of the SysV init (and insserv and startpar)
code this week and something which stood out was that there are several
areas in which support for SUSE is explicitly included. Basically, there
are a lot of lines which read "If we are doing this on SUSE do A,
otherwise do B." SUSE's init setup was a little different from, say,
Debian's or most other distributions and this led to a lot of little
exceptions in the code.

These days openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise use systemd and I'm fairly
sure no one in the SUSE community runs sysvinit anymore. Which raises
the question: do we still need special support for SUSE in the code, or
can it be removed?

I suspect the answer is it can be safely removed. This will make the
code a little more simple, a little easier to read. It won't really have
an impact on executable size or performance, but stripping out the
legacy support wouldn't hurt.
Before I edit out any SUSE support though I'd like to check to make sure
no one needs it. So if anyone still uses an environment where they need
new versions of sysvinit to run on SUSE, please speak up now. (Or at
least before July 31st 2019.)

- Jesse