Bug#727708: init system other points, and conclusion

[intrigeri <intrigeri@debian.org>]

Hi,

Ian Jackson wrote (31 Dec 2013 16:58:17 GMT) :
> I think you have misunderstood.  Or perhaps I hae misunderstood you.
> The "work" that I'm saying needs to be done anyway is the work to
> disentange the parts of systemd which are required by (say) GNOME from
> the parts which are only relevant for systemd as init.

I was talking about the very same work, so I think we're understanding
each other just fine on this point :)

Your reply helped me focus and clarify my analysis (that is not "the
project as whole" / "porters and upstart lovers" anymore), though.
Thank you.

It also helped me understand what, I think, a few things we disagree
on: first, who would have the "moral" responsibility of doing this
work; second, whether it matters at all; third, who would have to do
this work in practice.

In what follows, I'll try to keep my personal preferences (that don't
matter at all as far as the TC decision is concerned) aside, but
I don't expect to be entirely successful. Sorry about that in advance.
My conscious intent here is to help make this discussion more fruitful
and focused on what matters in practice; but it's obvious that my
analysis is somehow affected by the investments I've personally made
in the last 14 months (since then, I have been very happily running
systemd on almost every Wheezy or newer system that I am responsible
for). For the sake of full-disclosure, I have to add that I am a core
developer of a Debian derivative that relies on GNOME and does not
intend to switch any time soon.

> intrigeri writes ("Bug#727708: init system other points, and conclusion"):
>> The difference lies in who are the people who "need" to do this work
>> "anyway", and who else may instead dedicate their time to other tasks,
>> lead by their own desires and needs.

> I think that it is right that the costs of undoing systemd's bundling,
> be borne by the systemd community (including systemd's advocates and
> maintainers in Debian) rather than by Debian (or the rest of the Free
> Software world) at large.

First, I beg to disagree about who, in full rightness, would have the
"moral" responsibility to do this work. But as shown below, we don't
care much about what you or I think.

Second, regardless of what my or Ian's or the TC's or $DEITY's opinion
on this moral matter is, that's very much unimportant: in my belief,
the time and energy people put into Debian is rarely lead by a sense
of "moral" responsibility, especially when the work that "needs to be
done" is something they do *not* feel to be part of what they have
committed to in the first place. I happen to very much doubt that the
systemd community feels that they are committed to support the
use-case we are discussing (systemd minus its init component).

Hence, my third point is that in practice:

* If upstart is chosen as the default init: it might be that the
  systemd community shows little interest in doing this work (and, to
  be fair, I would find this totally understandable, and not
  surprising at all). Then, it is not unlikely that the people who end
  up doing this work are those who maintain reverse dependencies of
  the systemd stack, such as desktop environments (at least GNOME and
  Unity, in Debian and/or Ubuntu). They might have to do this because
  of the combination of 1. they want to keep their packages in working
  state in Debian and/or Ubuntu; 2. the decision to use upstart
  creates the need for someone to do this work; 3. for whatever
  reason, nobody else is doing it.

  If this were to happen, regardless of anyone's take on what full
  rightness would have called for, then the cost of the initial and
  ongoing work would be held by an important subset of our community,
  that is anyone who wants Debian to deliver a given modern DE.
  I realize that it's not the same as the Debian project as a whole,
  contrary to what I initially wrote. But it's a lot more people than
  just the systemd maintainers in Debian (I'm not comparing to the
  broader systemd community here, for reasons I've given above).

* If systemd is chosen as the default init: I am very doubtful that
  a decision of the TC regarding who has the "moral" responsibility of
  it would be enough to motivate the systemd community to tackle this
  work if they don't feel it's part of the mission they are committed
  to. It might be, but I don't think it's a reasonable assumption to
  make.

  So, with the information I have in hand, I'm sticking to my original
  point here: in practice, this would be a job for porters, for anyone
  who wants to allow users of Debian to give this amount of
  flexibility, and for any derivative who wants to use another init
  system; while others treat this effort with "deference and
  reasonable accommodation", and can get themselves busy, as they
  wish, with other means to scratch their own itch and/or make the
  world a better place.

My conclusion is that 1. in practice, the situation is far from being
as simple as: the systemd community will have to do it anyway; and 2.
the consequences of the TC decision is likely to affect very
different, though non-disjoint, 1. sets of people and, 2. (IMO more
importantly) use cases Debian has been supporting, and many
derivatives have been building upon for many years.

Cheers,
-- 
  intrigeri
  | GnuPG key @ https://gaffer.ptitcanardnoir.org/intrigeri/intrigeri.asc
  | OTR fingerprint @ https://gaffer.ptitcanardnoir.org/intrigeri/otr.asc