Re: Let's have a vote!

[Rob Owens <rowens@ptd.net>]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Steve Litt" <slitt@troubleshooters.com>
> 
> On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 13:13:51 -0400 (EDT)
> Rob Owens <rowens@ptd.net> wrote:
> 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: "The Wanderer" <wanderer@fastmail.fm>
> > > 
> > > On 09/22/2014 at 06:54 AM, Darac Marjal wrote:
> > > 
> > > Those are votes for Debian, but not for systemd, or for "Debian with
> > > systemd as central".
> > > 
> > > In the case at hand, the latter two are what people are asking to be
> > > able to have a vote (or at least meaningful input other than making
> > > noise) on, by virtue of being users who will be affected by the
> > > decision rather than by virtue of doing work to implement the
> > > decision.
> > 
> > I think the best voting method at this time is popularity-contest.
> > Make sure you have PARTICIPATE set to "yes".
> > 
> > Of course the vote is stacked somewhat in favor of systemd-sysv,
> > since it is the default and in some cases unavoidable due to
> > dependencies of desktop software.  So all of the "systemd-sysv" votes
> > in popularity-contest represent either:
> > 
> > 1) people who prefer systemd-sysv
> > 2) people who got systemd-sysv as a result of dependencies of
> > installing a package that they really do want 3) people who don't
> > care enough to switch away from the default, or 4) people who aren't
> > aware of the options, don't know what an init system is, etc.
> > 
> > -Rob
> 
> That's not really a true choice. There are a lot of other init programs
> out there, any one of which could be voted for. There's the position
> "let's wait until we have a good init to move to", which is very
> different from "let's use sysvinit". There's no place to write in an
> "other".
> 
Steve,

Popularity-contest simply keeps track of what packages are installed on a user's system.  So unless you install an init system from source, your "vote" would be counted.  (To be clear, I'm not sure if it would be counted if you installed a third-party package).

I agree that "let's wait until we have a good init to move to" should have been more seriously considered, but for some reason people were in a big hurry to make a move.  

Anyway, 'dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest' to make sure it's enabled.

-Rob