Re: upgrades must not change the installed init system [was: Re: Cinnamon environment now available in testing]
Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez <clopez@igalia.com> writes:
> Most of our users don't care as long as their machines continue to work
> as expected after an upgrade.
> So, when upgrading from Wheezy to Jessie, we have three options:
> 1) Keep the user init system (sysvinit most probably)
> 2) Upgrade to systemd after asking the user.
> 3) Upgrade to systemd silently without asking the user.
> I believe that the actual option (number 3) is going to cause much
> breakage than the other alternatives.
> Also, as I already expressed on bug #747535 this is not something I
> would expect from Debian.
> I expect Debian to be rock solid stable and to have painless upgrades
> from one version to the next. The conservative (and safe) option is 1.
> I understand that we want users to switch to systemd, so proper testing
> is done and bugs are reported. So option 2 is a good compromise. By
> asking users, each one can decide if he wants to risk to try systemd or
> not.
+1
I don't believe we should switch init systems on upgrade without at least
a prompt, and given how easy it is to switch to systemd later, I think it
would be best to not switch init systems at all during an upgrade unless
forced to do so by other package dependencies (that may not happen at all
if systemd-shim is good enough).
We can prominantly document in the release notes how to switch to systemd
and encourage our users to do so, but there are enough differences in
behavior and enough conffiles that sysvinit honors and systemd doesn't
that I don't think we should just plow ahead without being clear about
what's going on.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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