Bug#727708: package to change init systems [was: Bug#727708: Processed: block 726763 with 727708]

[Chris Knadle <Chris.Knadle@coredump.us>]

On Saturday, February 01, 2014 19:14:21 Cameron Norman wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 6:35 PM, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> > I *like* systemd, and I would still be very unhappy
> > if a routine aptitude upgrade (or even a dist-upgrade) of a system
> > currently running sysvinit suddenly resulted in running systemd without
> > some sort of critical debconf question or the like.
> 
> In my mind, the package to change init systems would still be separate from
> its respective init systems.

There's a work-in-progress tool starting to implement this, it currently works
for switching between sysvinit and systemd, and will work with others later
(assuming the package interdependencies can be worked out).


$ apt-cache show init-select

Package: init-select
Version: 1.20140109
Installed-Size: 50
Maintainer: Michael Gilbert <mgilbert@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Depends: debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0, grub-coreboot | grub-efi-amd64 | grub-efi-i386 | grub-emu | grub-ieee1275 | grub-pc
Suggests: systemd
Description-en: init system selection tool
 init-select makes it easy to select among the available init systems (the
 first process initiated when the system starts).  To select an init other than
 the default, please run the command 'dpkg-reconfigure init-select' after this
 package has been installed.  Note that this will change the init used for all
 of the available Linux kernel selections in the bootloader menu.
 .
 init-select currently only supports the grub bootloader, but this will be
 expanded to lilo and other bootloaders in the future.



This is working for me so far.  Doesn't yet work for upstart or openrc, but
supporting them is in the TODO list.

  -- Chris

--
Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@coredump.us