Bug#727708: Init system resolution open questions
Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de> writes:
> Why does logind actually have to be a hard dependency for GNOME in
> jessie?
If it doesn't, then it's not an issue. But it seemed like at least a
possibility given upstream GNOME direction.
> What is your general position on what dependencies on a specific init
> system are acceptable, and which are not, if the CTTE decision will be
> that Debian will support multiple init systems?
In general, I think it should be up to the maintainers of that package,
with the understanding that it's potentially pretty obnoxious for our
users to require one init system, so it's not something to do lightly. I
truly don't think this will be a problem. Debian contributors already
understand this sort of thing.
If software that people want to package for Debian is deeply entangled in
one init system (that is supported in Debian), for good or for ill,
regardless of what one might think of the decisions made by upstream that
created that situation, I think it's going rather far to require the
Debian package maintainers to port it to different init systems in order
to get (or keep) their package in Debian. I have a very hard time
defending that position.
> Worst case:
> I can imagine valid technical reasons why systemd upstream might make
> udev depend on other parts of systemd. Hypothetically, tomorrow a new
> systemd release might be released where udev depends on systemd being
> the init system.
> network-manager is among the packages that already switched from
> ConsoleKit to logind in experimental (upstream still supports both).
> Looking at popcon stats, network-manager is used by 40% of all Debian
> users.
Note that I expect popcon stats to massively overcount desktops relative
to servers, so I'm pretty sure this percentage is wildly inflated. For
example, I have more than 200 systems not reporting to popcon (it's hard
to justify running popcon from a security perspective since, although the
risk is low, the upside for my employer is also very low), and not a
single one of them runs network-manager. They all just use ifupdown. I
expect that to be a very common scenario.
> udev is used by > 99% of all users of Debian on Linux. [1]
udev is getting close to required on Linux already. I'm not sure how many
people are testing the non-udev code paths, particularly for more obscure
packages. And that's the way I would expect this to go. The non-default
cases that are rarely used will tend to bitrot unless someone who cares
about them puts the work into making sure they keep working, and there's
some way to do that work that doesn't put too much of a burden on everyone
else.
> What percentage of Debian users locked into one init system by package
> dependencies would be the threshold for making a CTTE decision
> "Debian supports multiple init systems" a farce?
I don't think percentage of users is the right metric. By that metric,
Debian doesn't support kFreeBSD or Hurd right now. And yet, we do, even
though some of our software is not ported to those platforms yet (and
possibly ever).
I'm not sure the exact answer to your question, but I don't believe that
GNOME requiring systemd would make "Debian supports multiple init systems"
a farce. There are a bunch of other desktop environments, some of which
have more interest in portability (including to non-Linux, which would
obviously rule out a hard systemd dependency), as well as a bunch of ways
to use Debian that don't involve a desktop environment at all (like
servers). It would be nice if we could avoid it as long as people have
reasons to not want to use systemd (which may be indefinitely), but I also
don't think that burden should be carried by the GNOME package
maintainers. *If* it ends up being a burden. Steve doesn't think it will
be much of a burden, and I hope he's right.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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