Re: Survey answers part 3: systemd is not portable and what this means for our ports

[Mathieu Parent <math.parent@gmail.com>]

2013/7/19 Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>:
> John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> writes:
>> On 07/19/2013 02:55 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
>>> I believe the equivalent systemd package to the upstart package is the
>>> systemd-sysv package, so 174 rather than 1604 is perhaps the better
>>> number to use.
>
>> I'm not sure whether I can follow. I am using systemd on both my desktop
>> and my laptop and neither of them has the systemd-sysv package installed
>> which, AFAIK, is required for compatibility reasons only.
>
> I see no sign that installing systemd replaces init or takes over process
> 1.  All of the symlinks to do so are in the systemd-sysv package, and
> that's the only package that conflicts with sysvinit and thereby removes
> the other init system.  Am I missing something?  <checks>  Ah, here we go:
>
> | systemd can be installed alongside sysvinit and will not change the
> | behaviour of the system out of the box.  This is intentional.  To test
> | systemd, add:
> |
> | init=/bin/systemd
> |
> | to the kernel command line and then rebooting, or install the
> | systemd-sysv package.
>
> I didn't know about the init= method and was assuming the systemd-sysv
> method.  Anyway, my point is that I suspect the vast majority of the
> systems with the systemd package installed are not actually using it as
> process 1.
>
> The upstart package takes over process 1, so 100% of the systems with the
> upstart package installed are using it as process 1.  The same is true of
> systemd-sysv, of course.
>
> I don't think there's a way to do a straight apples to apples comparison
> on adoption based on the current popcon numbers.  The number of people
> running systemd is more than the install count of systemd-sysv, but less
> (and I suspect much less) than the install count of systemd.

As the recommended way to install systemd is using init= and not
installing systemd-sysv, maybe the popcon "vote" count is the correct
metric?

NB: "vote is the number of people who use this package regularly"


According http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=upstart%2Csystemd&from_date=2013-06-06:

systemd is "used regulardly" on about 1200 popcon submiters, upstart
on about 600 (this is even less than 100 from 2013-07-04, but what
happened!).

Regards
--
Mathieu Parent