#1136479 cinnamon-session uses pidof but does not depend on procps

#1136479#5
Date:
2026-05-13 23:25:41 UTC
From:
To:
Dear maintainer(s) of cinnamon-session,

it appears that cinnamon-session uses `pidof` in its testsuite, or that
at least one of its binary packages uses `pidof` at runtime.
Historically, `pidof` was provided by the Essential package
`sysvinit-tools`, making an explicit dependency unnecessary. However
`pidof` will soon be moved to `procps` and will no longer be part of
the Essential set.

Please add an explicit dependency on `procps`:

* via the `Depends:` field of all binary packages of cinnamon-session
  that use `pidof` at runtime;
* via the `Build-Depends:` field of cinnamon-session, if `pidof` is
  used in tests run at build-time;
* via the `Depends:` field of `debian/control/tests`, if `pidof` is
  used in autopkgtests.

To prevent any disruption for users of cinnamon-session, please add
this dependency now, before `pidof` is moved from `sysvinit-utils` to
`procps`. Alternatively, you could remove all uses of `pidof`.

It is believed that cinnamon-session uses `pidof` due to the following
code snippets:

```
path: cinnamon-session_6.4.2-1/cinnamon-session/csm-manager.c
{
        int num_processes;
        gchar *command = g_strdup_printf ("pidof %s | wc -l", name);
        FILE *fp = popen(command, "r");
        fscanf(fp, "%d", &num_processes);
```

Feel free to close this issue if this is a false positive (for example
if this code is in an unreachable code path).

Regards,