Bug#727708: init system - achieving diversity

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

I'm taking off my secretarial hat for a moment and presenting a short
polemic in favour of my proposal over Russ's (whether as amended by
Andi or not).

I'm addressing myself primarily to the members of the TC who are in
favour of diversity in init systems, and in architectures, and who
think that the freedom and autonomy of our users and downstreams is
more important than the convenience of us or our upstreams.

Do not think that Russ's text does anything to support these goals.
Nothing in it goes beyond the obvious and even that is purely advice.

It doesn't explicitly address the key question: "is it OK to require a
specific init system".  But, implicitly, it says "yes, that is OK".

We need to send a clear signal about our commitment to diversity that
will be received not just in Debian, but also in the upstream
communities where key decisions are being made - specifically, about
whether it is OK to require systemd.  Russ's text does not contain any
kind of decision or statement that could be used as a part of a strong
argument by systemd sceptics in the GNOME community, for example.

And, we need to make a commitment internally that we intend to
continue to support and encourage diversity and choice for the
foreseeable future.

Russ's proposal is worse than "no decision now".  At least Keith's
text clearly ducks the critical question.  Russ answers it the wrong
way.  The fact that Russ's resolution text doesn't make its own
unpleasant consequences explicit is effective politics, but it makes
for a bad TC ruling.

Ian.