Re: upstart: please update to latest upstream version
I said this in another message, but I'm not sure I was sufficiently
explicit, so I'm going to try again to inject a bit more reality into this
thread.
The next step for looking at alternative init systems is finalizing the
Policy changes that are required to support alternative init systems.
That discussion is happening separately in debian-policy (and is largely
complete). I believe there's already general consensus around documenting
what people *can* do if they choose to add such support, with the explicit
requirement that sysvinit scripts continue to be supported.
At that point, we can start actually testing Debian with alternative init
systems and individual packagers can decide whether to add support for
specific alternative init systems like upstart or systemd or continue to
rely on their init system emulation.
This will give us considerably more data about many things: what benefits
we can see from this approach, how difficult it is for the early adopters
to write upstart or systemd configuration, what a transition would look
like, and so forth, without causing any harm to the rest of Debian or
doing anything irreversible. It will also let us *do* things and see
whether they work rather than just *talking* about things, which is
usually a substantial improvement.
This is very similar to the approach that was taken for rolling out
dependency-based boot.
Once we have that practical experience and a Policy framework in which we
can do that experiment, we will have considerably more data and will be
able to have a more informed debate.
I think the current argument has reached the point where it's a waste of
everyone's time. We have a pretty good idea of what we're doing in the
short run, none of the discussion we're currently having is particularly
relevant to that, and much of the discussion is speculation without data
that we'll be able to acquire later. Worse, I think it has degraded to
the point where a small number of people with strongly held views are
basically repeating their views at each other without any hope of anyone
changing their mind. This is bad, since it hardens everyone's views and
makes it more difficult for everyone later to reconsider in the light of
additional evidence and possibly change their minds.
People can certainly continue talking about this if they want to and feel
like they have something significantly new to add, but I'd ask everyone to
seriously consider just letting this conversation end right now and
revisit the discussion later when we have more information and a better
framework in which to have it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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