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

[Andreas Barth <aba@ayous.org>]

* Thijs Kinkhorst (thijs@debian.org) [131106 12:51]:
> Nonetheless, that's not relevant here. There are several likely candidates
> in existence, so the choice will not be to use something existing versus
> implementing from scratch; the choice will be between existing projects,
> and given that, the amount of work per system may differ but the
> difference will not likely be that great that it's unsurmountable, as they
> exist, they have active upstreams and they have successfully been used in
> other distributions.

I'm not sure we are all convinced about that. And the question is not
only "do they have active upstreams", but also "would upstream
(continue to) develop things in a direction that's also useful for
us". Taking an example (and this one is made-up, so please don't use
the flame-key on me), if systemd would start to only work with the
gnome desktop chooser this might be considered inacceptable, and
wouldn't be too helpful for us I'd expect. Same example would work
with upstart and unity. Or whatever else.


> I do agree that it's nice to have the very best code quality available,
> but in the long run, having underdocumented code is annoying and may lead
> to bugs, but bugs can be fixed and documentation improved; changing the
> basic architecture of the system is unlikely to be fixed. I really believe
> we are going to regret it if Debian chooses the architecture it likes less
> for the reason that it has more documentation.

In the end (at least from my perspective) we need to choose on a set
of advantages and disadvantages. There are different sets available
(or at least there is no consensus in Debian at large that only one of
them works).

First of all, we need to check which ones would be working at all. If
we notice that one of them won't allow us to properly release jessie,
I think we don't need to check if that architecture might be a bit
nicer. Also, if we notice that one architecture is unbearable broken,
the same applies. If we however notice that a set might only work if
Debian spends quite some effort, and we also notice that there are
enough people in Debian willing to do the work - well, that returns
this set in the group of sets we could choose from.

Of course it still could happen that after this pre-check we end up
with examples where we say "no, really not because" and we have to
re-evaluate what other optins we have. But also we're not there yet.


Andi