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Bug#727708: tech-ctte: Decide which init system to default to in Debian.



Hi,

apart of the arguments raised by others, I'd like to point out three
more things:

- If we'd be inclined to switch the init system to something different
to sysvinit, let's start rather soon than later. Starting with today we
have one year until we expect to freeze which sounds like a lot, but
it's not if you take in mind that (up to) 1200 packages [1] need to be
adapted to this change, some in a non-trivial way. I guess any
alternative being discussed here is able to provide some fall-back
mechanism in case it's really needed, but if we rely on that, I don't
see a reason to switch in the first place. Thus, I'd appreciate if the
TC decides on that case rather soon than later since I'm one of these
persons who maintains several not-trivial init scripts.

- Please bear in mind that supporting more than one init script type is
not feasible or doable. Especially for non-trivial scripts [2][3]
maintaining an init script is a substantial piece of work, and I claim,
that we could spend our time in better ways than maintaining three
pieces of code (or, as for me, meta-language description files) which
all need to be tested, fixed and updated every once in a while. I guess,
I could deal with that burden once for Jessie, but please don't get us
into that as a long term solution.

- Whatever you decide, please do also turn your attention to the outside
world apart of Debian. This discussion was raised (well, this time),
because Gnome started to depend transitionally on systemd. Whether we
like it or not, but we're not the center of the universe. There are
distributions, and very important pieces of software outside the control
Debian and the TC that have (biased) points of view conflicting with
Debian's on this matter. Thus, I suspect that we are not going to
succeed with an isolated island solution, which does not care about the
ways other distributions move - especially since the init system choice
seems to be heavily tied to the choice of the desktop these days.
Whether it's systemd or upstart, both have major players standing behind
its respective technologies, each with substantial financial resources
to drive development of these platforms in a direction where Debian with
an isolated solution cannot compete with, due to its community driven
organizational structure.


[1] $ apt-file search /etc/init.d | wc -l
1194
[2]
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-apache/apache2.git;a=blob;f=debian/apache2.init;h=f5977abd302115e1517110fc2e00ca0cd2054afd;hb=HEAD
[3]
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/wouter/nbd.git;a=blob;f=debian/nbd-client.init.d;h=23994dd93b315533ee43bbb961b21aa40ff25c00;hb=HEAD

-- 
with kind regards,
Arno Töll
IRC: daemonkeeper on Freenode/OFTC
GnuPG Key-ID: 0x9D80F36D

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