Steve Langasek wrote:
No, that's not the true package relationship. There's no reason that you should always get this added service by default when you install a system with non-systemd init that doesn't need logind. Making this a recommends would be a workaround for bad metadata in the libpam-systemd package; we should fix that problem at its source the right way.
I filed bug #746578 against libpam-systemd back in May; I believe the proposed change (depend on systemd-shim | systemd-sysv rather than the other way around) addresses most if not all of this class of issues. It is currently WONTFIXed.
Abstractly, I believe the ideal situation would be for all init systems in the archive to be *completely* co-installable, with /sbin/init a symlink under control of the administrator; under no circumstances would installing or upgrading any package change that symlink. (It follows that systems upgraded from wheezy might wind up with systemd _installed_, but sysvinit would remain the active init until the local admin changed things manually. Obviously this would need to be documented.)
This would necessitate that all packages depending on specific functionality from the _running_ init be capable of detecting its absence at runtime and gracefully degrading their behavior. That may be nontrivial, but I believe that we need it _anyway_ so that when a system is deliberately converted from one init to another it continues to function more-or-less correctly until next rebooted.
Unfortunately, it may be too late for this for jessie :-( zw