systemd vs. upgrades

[Bob Tracy <rct@gherkin.frus.com>]

Unrelated to the specific upgrade issues, there's a larger problem with
Debian since the switch to "systemd".  Namely, if any upgrade touches
something controlled by "systemd", the odds of being able to do a clean
shutdown/reboot drop to approximately zero: the shutdown process hangs
due to services which became "unregistered" to allow for their replacement,
and you then have to hit the reset switch.

This is in no way a good thing.  My disks have been scanned by fsck far
more often than would otherwise be necessary over the past several months.
I suppose I should be grateful that the resulting mess seems to be
getting cleaned up reliably -- thus far.  If userspace doesn't get
touched between reboots, there's no issue: kernel upgrades in recent
times cause no more "excitement" than they traditionally have :-).

--Bob