Re: Bug#727708: tech-ctte: Decide which init system to default to in Debian.
]] Theodore Ts'o
> I don't think copyright assignment is a concern which afflicts
> Systemd, although there is a related concern which is that the
> upstream systemd developers appear to have a very strong point of
> view, and if there is some change which is needed for Debian or
> Debian's users, and it conflicts with their point of view, I could
> imagine situations where the Debian maintainers for systemd might need
> to carry a Debian-specific change, perhaps indefinitely.
systemd is not burdened with copyright assignment, no. So far, it has
not been necessary to carry patches forever as upstream is generally
interested in unifying and getting one way that works well for
everybody. This does mean that Debian might need to change in some
cases, but in other cases it's the other Linux distros that change. (An
example here is the unification and use of /etc/hostname where Fedora
and SUSE changed to match Debian.)
Depending on the reasons, the size and the complexity of the patch, I
would be willing to carry patches for a long time. I want to work
closely with upstream to ensure we don't introduce incompatibilities,
and I expect them to do the same in the other direction. That's also
been my experience so far.
Examples I can think of here are keeping the insserv and LSB support
around for a long time, even if they're removed upstream. Another would
be keeping support for early-boot sysvinit scripts, since we need that
for at least a while.
--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
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