On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 10:14:53AM +0000, Lars Wirzenius wrote: > There is a lot of feelings and temper involved in the current discussion > of init implementations in Debian. I'd like to try to de-escalate by > summarizing things in as objective and non-confrontational manner as I can. Lars, thanks for this summary. Despite the fact you seem to be unhappy about having posted it, I find it quite useful. For one thing, it's a good mail to restart from when thinking back about this whole debate after a while. I also have the impression that in discussions that are naturally prone to "religious arguments", it's unreasonable to expect that *all* contributions will be constructive (for some personal definition of "constructive"). There will always be contributions that we don't think are constructive, or that are simply partisan. That does not necessarily mean that the whole discussion has been useless. In all these "upstart vs systemd" threads, it seems to me that we've fixed quite some points. An important one is the lack of hands on experience with either of the contender (systemd, upstart) _in Debian_. A number of post in the threads seem to be just relying arguments from the respective marketing camps, which naturally attract the ire of people who have actually worked on the systems and feel the need to debunk myths. A number of other posts are on rather general principles (e.g. "we should not adopt something that is not ported on $system"). That is all fine and well. But we should all know how we like doing things in Debian: we will not bet the choice of the default init system on something we haven't tested. Therefore, a more productive use of the time of -devel readers will be on allowing all of us to test either option _in Debian_. How can we do that? Given the far reaching nature of init systems in all system services, the proper way to do that in the long run has been mentioned repeatedly by Russ in the threads: *support in Policy* for *optional* upstart jobs in packages. On that front, there seems to be quite some work done already, at least for upstart (see #591791). People interested in these discussion should really consider helping out policy finalization. It will be way more productive than trying to win an argument before the debian-devel audience --- which have close to no impact on the final choice we will make. It is not clear to me the status of similar policy work for systemd, although I see that systemd maintainers are participating in #591791. Again, if you're interested in Debian switch to systemd, please contribute to that work rather than arguing on -devel. But given that no one is seriously thinking of making the change for Wheezy, an important question is: how do we encourage more testing of either options in time for Wheezy+1? I think it'd be great to have well written guides that will allow Wheezy users to *experiment* with either upstart and systemd. Similar documents exist in the respective packages and have also been posted in form of blog posts on Planet Debian. People interested in pushing for one of the two options, should consider helping out with these documents. If they reach a good status, they can also be proposed for inclusion in official Wheezy documentation. Nothing like real feedback from our users will advance the cause of either upstart or systemd in Debian. Regarding porting, I recommend against using the argument "we should not switch to something not supported by the $non_linux_port we released in the past as technical preview". For one thing, the observation by Christoph is very compelling (i.e. "first we choose, than we port --- don't ask us to port before the choice"). For another, accepting that argument will make us *more conservative* in the future about accepting new ports. We will probably worry more and more about the impact on (currently) popular ports, of accepting new ports as supported. In the long run, we will probably diminish our willingness to accept new port as supported. That would be a shame and also a strategic error. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o . Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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