Bug#727708: loose ends for init system decision

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery writes ("Bug#727708: loose ends for init system decision"):

>> 6. Debian's non-Linux ports should either use the same init system as
>>    Debian's Linux ports or agree on an init system that they're both going
>>    to use.  The porting work is going to be hard enough without the ports
>>    going in different directions on which secondary init system they want
>>    to use.  I prefer to leave it up to the porters to decide which init
>>    system to choose, but I do think OpenRC would be a strong contender.

> Is there some difficulty expected with upstart on hurd ?

I don't know if anyone has looked at it, and in the absence of any
practical experience, I think it's fair to expect some challenges.  The
blog post on kFreeBSD porting indicated that the porting effort to date
required eglibc and FreeBSD kernel changes.  It seems like a reasonable
assumption that at least a similar level of effort will be required on
Hurd, and I don't know if the Hurd has as mature (if incompatible)
capabilities such as kqueue on FreeBSD to use to implement such things as
inotify or epoll.

I know very little about the Hurd, so basically I just don't know.

> I would be very reluctant to write now that the support for sysvinit, or
> the non-default new system, may be dropped in jessie+1.  That will
> result in premature rot and removal.

> It's also possible that some kind of compatibility mechanism will become
> available.

That's a reasonable point.  I have no objections to deferring that
decision until after the jessie release.

> I would like to leave this decision to the policy maintainers, with the
> expectation that the TC will probably need to decide.

Yeah, with my Policy hat on, I don't want any piece of that one.  I would
be inclined to immediately escalate to the TC.  I don't believe that
Policy's conservative consensus approach is going to work here, and I
expect trying to be painful.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>