[gentoo-user] Re: --depclean wants to remove openrc. Yikes!

[Martin Vaeth <martin@mvath.de>]

Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> First, it doesn't sound like qmail actually requires daemontools, but
> simply happens to include a daemontools service config.

My understanding is that qmali contains a "daemon" which does not
daemonize itself. To my knowledge, you can start such a thing
only with daemontools and systemd; probably the start-daemon of
openrc is not powerful enough for this.
But you are right that even in this case an || dependency on
daemontools and systemd is questionable.

(However, this does not solve the OPs problem, because unless
you are an expert and write a systemd-script you will then
*want* to install daemontools and actually put it into your
world file.)

> Second, it sounds like daemontools requires openrc to run.

No. As I mentioned in another post, systems can run even without
any init-system, and there are two frequent use cases for this:
dedicated servers and embedded systems, e.g. used for fileserving,
firewalling, as log servers, or whatever.
On such systems, you might want just a shell script which starts
the serving daemons (e.g. using daemontools), and nothing more.
Perhaps you actually want a dedicated mail server which runs
only qmail and daemontools...

Moreover, even if you want an additional init-system, this need
not necessarily be openrc, but might also be runit or some other
system not in portage (I cannot recall the names, currently).

By the same argument you have given above, a dependency of
daemontools on some other init system (even a || dependency)
is questionable.