#1136480 cinnamon uses pidof but does not depend on procps

#1136480#5
Date:
2026-05-13 23:25:45 UTC
From:
To:
Dear maintainer(s) of cinnamon,

it appears that cinnamon 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
  that use `pidof` at runtime;
* via the `Build-Depends:` field of cinnamon, 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, 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 uses `pidof` due to the following
code snippets:

```
path: cinnamon_6.4.13-2/utils/cin-debug
pname = sys.argv[1]
pid = subprocess.check_output(["pidof", pname]).decode('utf-8')
logfile = "%s/%s-%s.log" % (home, pname, datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%l:%M:%S"))
```

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

Regards,