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

[Matthias Klumpp <mak@debian.org>]

2013/7/22 Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>:
> Игорь Пашев <pashev.igor@gmail.com> writes:
>> 2013/7/22 Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net>:
>
>>> We would be effectively "locked in".
>
>> We are locked in sysvinit.
>
> Except we're not: both systemd and upstart support sysvinit scripts.
> Which is why we can do a gradual migration, or even switch back and forth
> between various alternatives.  However, the native formats of both systemd
> and upstart (and, for that matter, OpenRC) are mutually incompatible, so
> migration from one to another is much more difficult than migration from
> sysvinit to any of the alternatives once a substantial number of init
> scripts are written in the new format and the old init scripts are
> dropped.
>
> That's the point.
>
> I can certainly see why people may not consider that a significant
> drawback, or may consider other advantages more than worth that tradeoff,
> and indeed we do make tradeoffs like that all the time.  I'm not horribly
> worried about it personally.  But that doesn't change the fact that it
> *is* a potential drawback.  If we adopt a single alternative and move a
> substantial number of the current init scripts to the new format, we have
> locked ourselves into that alternative in a more substantial way than we
> currently have (where we're using a portable, if horrible, init format
> that is supported by all the alternatives).
Well, if a new alternative is written in future, and there already is
a substantial number of scripts in $format, it will almost certainly
support these, and we can migrate away to the new system. It will be
the same situation as we currently have sith SysV-Init.
So I wouldn't worry about this at all :-)
Regards,
    Matthias