Transition handling in Debian (was: systemd, again)
Matthias Urlichs wrote:
>In any case, IMHO a system that's been installed with wheezy, and
>then upgraded to jessie, should be identical to a system installed with
>jessie in the first place.
That is nothing but wrong. A system upgraded will (very probably) have a
different configuration - because we don't touch configuration files altered
by the user - and it can also have a different MTA, GCC, Kernel etc.pp. either
by updated-alternatives or by not having dependency-packages installed or ....
Your argument is only reasonable for a plain standard system, which a user
did not alter. IIRC we do require this upgrade path by policy for such system.
However, this is *well* less then 1 percent of all systems?
The discussion e.g. about switching between default desktop environments has AFAIK
NOT come to the conclusion, that we begin to touch the users system and change
his/hers decision of which DE to use. If a user wants that, IMO we should provide a
dependency package like gcc or linux-image, because the DE or the kernel is vital
in many cases. If there is no such package, how do you come to the conclusion,
that you can force e.g. the default kernel or DE shipped with Jessie to be in
place on the upgraded system? Thus the decision to transition a system to a different
default has to be a sensitive one, because most systems won't be plain standard systems.
Otherwise you behave nothing better then Microsoft: installing updates even if
the user has chosen to download them only.
>Thus, unless the user explicitly tells the apt{-get,itude} subsystem not
>to switch to systemd (by whatever means, the details of which I personally
>am not at all interested in), a dist-upgrade should do so.
If the project decides to transition the default init system, that has to be
expected, yes, like it was with apache1.4->2.0, many library transitions ...
AFAIK it has also been suggested to handle the init system transition via
dependency packages (IIRC called init? not sure). IMO this could be a sensitive
technical decision for all those, who would like to keep things working as
they are or those who prefer a different init system.
Regards, Daniel
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