Bug#727708: Init system resolution open questions

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 09:45:35AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>...
> 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.

So in the hypothetical case that systemd upstream decides to make udev 
hard depend on systemd being pid 1, would you even defend that such a
change could go into jessie if the CTTE decision was that Debian should
support multiple init systems?

 
> > 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.
>...
> > udev is used by > 99% of all users of Debian on Linux. [1]
> 
> udev is getting close to required on Linux already.
>...

We are in full agreement on that.

And my point on top of that is that if the CTTE decsion would be that 
Debian should support multiple init systems, but it does not set a 
policy limiting strictly what hard dependencies on systemd are allowed,
then it would be better if the CTTE would rule that Debian should 
support only systemd since that's what would anyway happen in practice
through package dependencies pretty soon.

If Debian wants to support multiple init systems and wants to continue 
supporting non-Linux ports, then Debian's policy must force Debian 
maintainers to put pressure on their upstreams to keep support for
non-systemd systems and for non-Linux kernels.

And where that is not possible, such issues have to be resolved before 
the packages hit unstable. [1]


cu
Adrian

[1] E.g. in the hypothetical udev worst case, a second udev package
    based on a fork that does not depend on systemd might be required.

-- 

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