Enable chaining of commands in inittab

The new 3.11 release introduces one important feature and a handful of documentation fixes.

The highlight of this release is the ability to chain together multiple commands in the inittab file. This allows the administrator to use command line AND or OR logic inside the inittab file. For example:

  ww:c:once:/usr/bin/command1 || echo "Command failed" > /var/log/command

Alternatively....

 ww:c:once:/usr/bin/command1 && echo "Success" > /var/log/command"

Documentation on which symbols are allowed in the inittab file has been updated.

The rest of the changes for this version of SysV deal with the syntax and typos in the manual pages. In particular, the inittab, halt, and fstab-decode manual pages have been updated.

Fixes bootlogd loop, support "machinectl stop"

This release introduces one new feature, a bug fix, and some documentation improvements.

• When the user executes "machinectl stop", systemd sends SIGRTMIN+4 to PID 1 in the container, and expects that to initiate a graceful shutdown (power-off). SysV init now catches this signal and initiates a shutdown (shutdown -hP now).

• Fix issue in bootlogd which could cause the service to enter an endless loop (and use too much CPU) when it is able to open a device for writing, but not actually able to write to it. This resulted in bootlogd closing and re-opening the device over and over. Now bootlogd should simply fail gracefully when it cannot write to an open file/device.

• Fix formatting in shutdown.8 manual page. Cleaned up whitespace and special characters.

Enable biulding with musl C, pass boot messages to firmware

Version 3.09 of SysV init contains to key changes.

1. On Linux distributions which use the musl C library (instead of glibc) we can now build properly. Specifically, the hddown helper program now builds on musl C systems.

2. The reboot command is now able to pass messages to the underlying firmware on Linux systems during a reboot. This allows the admin to pass information to the underlying firmware to, for example, ask the system to boot from another partition. Should be helpful on Raspberry Pi systems.

The reboot command can pass a message to the firmware when using the "-m" command line flag.

This release also improves the Makefile's clean directive.

Enable kexec, fix halt in some situations

This release focuses on three changes which are basically imports of patches from Gentoo. Special thanks to floppym for supplying these.

• Applied a patch from floppm which adds kexec option to the halt command. This can be used as "halt -k".

• floppym provided patch which causes the halt command to call "shutdown -h -H" instead of "shutdown -h" when halt is invoked without parameters. This forces the shutdown command to set the INIT_HALT variable and assume, unless other conditions apply, that the "halt" call really wants to halt the machine and INIT_HALT should be set. In other words we assume halt wants to halt unless told otherwise.
  Addresses downstream Gentoo bug ID 911257.

• Updated halt documentation and help output to display parameters in alphabetical order.

Fixes for killall5 and pidof

The 3.07 release of SysV init mostly introduces fixes and improvements for the killall5 and pidof programs. (These are actually the same program, but are invoked with two different names, which result in different behaviour. The main highlights in this release are:

Fixed killall5 so that processes in the omit list are not sent any signals, including SIGSTOP.

Fixed usage message for killall5 to be more accurate.

pidof was not returning PIDs of programs which were launched using a symbolic link. This has been fixed so programs run from a symbolic link show up in process lists.

Build fixes and translation of manual pages

• Mark Hindley fixed typo in es.po

• Mark Hindley cleaned up translation code in src/Makefile.

• Drop sulogin from Debian build. Removed libcrypt-dev dependency.

• Fixed pt translation pages which were failing due to mis-matched open/close tags.

• Makefile now respects ROOT prefix when setting up pidof-to-killall5 symbolic link.

• Removed redundant translation files from man directory.

• Makefile now respects DESTDIR. User can specify either ROOT= or DESTDIR= to set install prefix.

Translation updates and compile fixes

This release (3.05) focuses on two things:

1. Updating the translation framework.
2. Fixing compiling issues on various systems.

The second point, compiling, encompasses a few minor changes to get SysV init to build properly on GNU Hurd, systems without certain GNU assumptions, and systems running the latest glibc library (2.36 at time of writing).

Fix for building on Hurd

This release contains one minor fix which allows the bootlogd code to properly compile on Debian's GNU Hurd branch.

Minor fix for muslc and GNU Hurd systems

This release includes two minor changes. One is fixing a typo in the init manual page (init.8). this fix was offered by Mark hindley.

Mark, and a few other people, also pointed out that a fix in 3.02 for bootlogd introduced reliance on a defined PATH_MAX constant. This is used elsewhere in the code, but is not explicitly defined in bootlogd, which caused bootlogd to not build properly on GNU Hurd and musl C systems. This has been fixed.

Documentation translation framework added and minor fixes

• Added q and Q flags to synopsis in shutdown manual page.

• Applied fixes for markup and spacing in manual pages.
  Patch provided by Mario Blattermann.

• Added translation framework (po4a) from Mario Blttermann.

• Added Makefile for man/ directory. Will handle translations
  and substitutions.

• Applied new translations for multiple languages from Mario Blattermann.

• Added ability to use "@" symbol in command named in the inittab file. This
  treats commands as literal and does not launch a shell to interpret them.

• Updated inittab manual page to include overview of symbols which trigger
  a shell interpretor and how to disable them using the @ symbol.

• Introduced change which adds error checking in bootlogd when performing
  chdir(). - Provided by Alexander Vickberg

• Add check for console using TIOCGDEV on Linux systems in bootlogd to
  make finding console more robust. - Provided by Alexander Vickberg