Bug#746715: the foreseeable outcome of the TC vote on init systems
On 05/06/14 23:15, Ian Jackson wrote:
For the record, the TC expects maintainers to continue to support
the multiple available init systems in Debian. That includes
merging reasonable contributions, and not reverting existing
support without a compelling reason.
Considering:
- The technical committee has decided that Jessie is going to have a
default init system and that would be systemd,
- Testing a package's support for an alternative init systems is a
complicated manual process that requires non-trivial modifications,
such as switching init systems and rebooting or maintaining VMs,
- Upstart has a popcon install count of 99,
- Debian maintainers are not required to care about derivatives,
- Even for those of us that do care about Ubuntu, upstart's future in
Ubuntu (and in general) is unclear given Mark Shuttleworth's blog
post[1] that was posted immediately after tech-ctte's systemd
decision,
- Unlike, say, openrc or sysvinit, there are no Debian release
architectures that would specifically benefit from upstart in the
jessie timeframe.
- Upstart's failure mode for a package's lack of an upstart job is to
execute the corresponding SysV init script and hence is not a
regression,
...I'm having a hard time convincing myself to treat potential upstart
bugs as anything but very low priority wishlist bugs. I haven't gotten
any such bug reports, so this is still theoretical, but I think I'd
simply reject anything more complicated than simply adding a
debian/foo.upstart file to the tree, including adding (and maintaining)
hacks or modifying existing SysV init scripts. I certainly won't work on
adding an upstart job to my packages myself.
If the committee feels differently about this, I think it'd be useful to
express this in a more clarified manner and possibly incorporate this
into policy. For what it's worth, the current wording of "contin[uing]
to support", "merging reasonable contributions" and "without a
compelling reason" leaves a lot of room for interpretation and changes
nothing for me compared to the previous resolution or the status quo
before it.
Regards,
Faidon
1: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316
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