Bug#727708: loose ends for init system decision
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> When it comes to technology choices, you win some and you lose some. If
> upstart wins, I will be happy. If systemd wins, I will also be happy,
> because it's long overdue that Debian *make a decision*; and for all
> that there are aspects of systemd that make me uncomfortable, it will
> still be far better than the status quo.
I concur with this.
I freely admit that I fell in love with systemd while investigating both
systems, but if we agree to use upstart, I will happily go add upstart
configurations to all of my packages and make use of those features. It's
still a massive improvement over what we have now.
Furthermore, and more philosophically, Debian has to learn how to respect
a governance process and make decisions. We spent way too much time and
effort not making decisions in this project, which results in big
flamewars and discomfort and everyone sniping at each other while little
productive happens. Frequently, I think this is like tearing off bandages
over the course of months. The cumulative pain is much higher than if we
just made a decision and everyone knew where they stood and what reality
they needed to adjust to.
Also, I too am happy when we can successfully pursue all courses of action
at the same time, but at the end of the day, we're trying to create a
distribution, and that means integrating components, and that means
deciding on integration protocols. It's not useful to try to integrate
everything with everything else in every possible way at the same time.
You just create an unmanageable combinatoric explosion of possibilities,
and then someone who just wants to run a Debian system doesn't know which
paths are supported and tested, and which paths have only been touched by
one developer if that.
We need to pick a winner. That doesn't mean we need to pick losers. It
does mean that one solution is going to get better support than everything
else, because that's what integration *means*. It doesn't mean, or
shouldn't mean, that other solutions are impossible if someone wants to
make them work; it just means that we're not going to *require* that they
work in order to get one's software into Debian.
We probably should have had this discussion for wheezy, to be honest. But
regardless, we should pick a default, supported init system for jessie.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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