Bug#727708: init system discussion status
On Fri, 2014-01-03 at 16:40 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> > I've written a version of Niklaus's rule about dependencies:
>
> > Likewise, packages must not Depend on or Recommend (directly or
> > indirectly) a specific init(1). Violations of this are also an RC
> > bug in jessie.
>
> > And:
>
> > Theses rules do not apply to machinery which itself forms part of
> > the implementation of one or more init systems.
>
> > That seems to be the clearest way to put the matter.
>
> This seems fine to me, at least for right now. I'm doing a bit of
> additional research right now to be sure that I understand the
> implications of this and may end up asking for any problems that anyone is
> aware of with this approach, just to be sure we're not missing something.
Packages could functionally depend on systemd - one example would be
systemd-ui (though it seems to be mostly abandoned, and comes from the
same source; it's not really "part of the machinery forming the
implementation" though). OTOH this doesn't have to be a package-level
dependency; probably programs from such packages could just fail with an
error if you try to run them after booting with sysvinit, and this would
probably be the best option as switching init as a "side effect" of
installing such a package would be questionable.
One case to consider is what should happen with GNOME if it requires
interfaces that nobody has implemented for sysvinit. Is it OK to show a
screen saying "you need to boot with systemd to use GNOME" and expect
GNOME users to manually install systemd? Or should there be more
user-friendly automation for installing it? Or would you expect to find
someone to create GNOME packages without such dependencies?
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