Bug#727708: loose ends for init system decision
Michael Gilbert <mgilbert@debian.org> writes:
> Doesn't a TC mandate on the default init system in some sense violate
> Debian's spirit of meritocracy?
I believe that we have enough information to make an informed choice
already, and that the sides are fairly well-defined and hardened in their
opinions. That means that this dispute falls under section 6.1.2 of the
constitution:
Decide any technical matter where Developers' jurisdictions overlap.
In cases where Developers need to implement compatible technical
policies or stances (for example, if they disagree about the
priorities of conflicting packages, or about ownership of a command
name, or about which package is responsible for a bug that both
maintainers agree is a bug, or about who should be the maintainer for
a package) the technical committee may decide the matter.
Regardless of how we structure the installer, we need to have a default
init system (unless we plan on making every user choose, which I would
dismiss out of hand as a horrible UI experience for the average user, who
really doesn't care). We have to mandate support for at least that
default init system. Realistically, the ability of the Debian developer
community to support more than one init system is limited, since any given
system is generally only going to run one. That means the level of
quality of integration is going to drop off significantly relative to the
default init system, particularly over time.
Init systems are not like desktop environments: they require work by a
huge swath of the developer community, and the average user does not
generally switch from one to the other. The reality is that either
systemd or upstart is fully capable of everything the typical user is
going to need (for that matter, sysvinit is capable of most of what the
typical user needs); there isn't the same driving force of user preference
that leads users to switch between desktop environments, and quite a bit
more integration support is required for the init system.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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