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Re: upgrades must not change the installed init system [was: Re: Cinnamon environment now available in testing]



> You cannot have an MTA without configuring it, and nobody even tried to
> implement auto-migration of the old default mailer's configuration to the
> new one. Also, we didn't switch to a different default mailer because the
> new one offered a heap of features and infrastructure which the other
> lacked. None of this applies to systemd.

This does apply to systemd too.

When I got "upgraded" to systemd on july, my system was completely
misbehaving for several reasons related to my configuration:

- I had an ISO mount in my fstab, whose file didn't exist any more,
sysvinit never complained about it, systemd just stopped at boot.
- I had several bind mounts, forming loops, which has never been a
problem for sysvinit, but it made systemd take ages to boot & shutdown
because it'd crazily bring thousands of lines in /proc/mounts, details
in #755674.
- I had tweaks in /etc/inittab to get the gettys earlier than
daemon starts, in case those get stuck etc., this does not work any
more with systemd.
- I had tweaks in /etc/inittab to have more gettys on the text console,
this does not work with systemd any more.
- I had tweaks in /etc/inittab to shutdown instead of reboot when I
press ctrl-alt-backspace, this does not work with systemd any more.

If I had tweaks in /etc/inittab to enable serial consoles, would the
upgrade to systemd kept them working?  I haven't found code about this.
This is *especially* important for servers, for which that might be the
only way to access the system without having to take the bike to get to
the datacenter.

Of course, these are all bugs that could be fixed in systemd.  I however
doubt we can discover (and fix) them all for Jessie, and I strongly
doubt that the first item of my list (which is more a difference of
behavior than a bug) will be ever be fixed actually.

If it ain't broken, don't break it.

Samuel


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