Re: Technical committee acting in gross violation of the Debian constitution

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

"Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult" <enrico.weigelt@gr13.net> writes:

> What about the enforced replace on dist-upgrade, which at least produces
> lots of extra work and can easily cause systems being unbootable ?

It's an urban legend that people are getting all upset about even though
it's not actually true?

Right now, there is a pre-upgrade step that you have to take (apt-get
install sysvinit-core prior to dist-upgrade) to avoid switching to systemd
[*].  That's certainly not the best imaginable UI, but there's nothing
"enforced" about an upgrade that you can easily avoid with one preliminary
step.

Those of us who have been using Debian for a while and have gone through
many dist-upgrades will remember several releases where there were
pre-upgrade steps we had to take for dist-upgrade to succeed, including
some that could make the system unbootable if forgotten.  It's never
ideal, but, once again, people are confusing the normal variation of
Debian releases with the end of the world because the letters "systemd"
happen to be attached.  (This is not to say that we shouldn't aspire to
doing better when we can.  Only that people are getting unnecessarily
panicked about this.)

[*] It's possible that you may also have to add a pin and/or install
    systemd-shim, but hopefully not.  I think if a pin is also necessary,
    there's a bug somewhere, although I haven't investigated it myself and
    don't know how easy it would be to fix that bug.  Regardless, one step
    or two, we can certainly document this in the release notes even if it
    doesn't get better before the release.  We should definitely sort out
    the exact working instructions for what we ship with jessie and get
    them into the release notes before we release.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>