On 2018-10-16 at 08:48, Philipp Kern wrote:
> On 2018-10-16 14:36, Ian Jackson wrote:
>
>> Philipp Kern writes ("Re: Debian Buster release to partially drop
>> non-systemd support"):
>>
>>> Could someone reiterate about what the current state of init
>>> diversity is supposed to be? Is it assumed to be best effort of
>>> every maintainer being required to ship an init script next to
>>> the systemd unit that is actually used by default[1]?
>>
>> I think describint that as `effort' is rather much.
>
> I don't understand. If I submit a merge request to the maintainer,
> it's on me to test what I submit actually works. So if I add stuff
> for a completely different init system I have to test it. The
> question is: Is the package buggy if it does not contain an init
> script but a systemd unit and it seems to be the case. Note that
> there are a *lot* of useful options in a systemd unit that would need
> emulation to make properly work with sysvinit.
To my eye, this resembles the situation I see with Websites and JavaScript.
My position is that any Webpage which does not inherently need to be
dynamic (as only a tiny fraction of them do) should have a fallback to
work "well enough" in an environment which lacks JavaScript.
Importantly, "well enough" does *not* mean "just as well".
One example I give of the difference is that once upon a time, when I
visited an article on the Website of the Washington Post in Firefox with
NoScript, the page would render with multiple screens' worth of blank
space (except possibly for a generic left-hand sidebar) at the top,
before the actual page content - the article itself - at the bottom.
That was in no way working "just as well" as the with-JavaScript case,
but it did let me read the article, so it did qualify as working "well
enough".
In the same way, I would opine that a package does not need to work
"just as well" via the init script as via the systemd unit in order to
qualify as having sufficient sysvinit support, but it does need to work
"well enough" that way. That is, not all the fancy bells and whistles
that could be make the package more useful or easier to work with or
suchlike necessarily need to be included, but the basic functionality
should be present.
(And I say that as a near-diehard sysvinit user, who finds the idea of
sysvinit being dropped from Debian a source of considerable stress.)
--
The Wanderer
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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