Joey Hess wrote:
Miles Fidelman wrote:
But that is the major objection of those of us who USE Debian --
the need to
do so, particularly when this concerns production servers.
Sysvinit will continue to be supported on servers in Debian 8 (jessie)
release of Debian. So you can continue to boot your production servers
with sysvinit.
A reasonably proactive admin would probably want to try out systemd (on
eg, a test server) and if it causes problems for their deployment, they
then have at least the year or two from when Debian jessie is released
until the *next* release to file bug reports and follow up on them.
Too early to say what will happen in Debian 9, but
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746715#278
is not going to be overturned without a GR either.
Ok... for others who are concerned, this is the punch-line from that bug
report:
-------------------
From: Don Armstrong <don@debian.org>
To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org
Subject: [CTTE #746715] Continuing support for multiple init systems
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 19:36:30 -0700
[Message part 1
<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=278;att=0;bug=746715>
(text/plain, inline)]
The technical committe was asked in #746715 to address the removal of
support for upstart in a package.
==== RESOLUTION ====
The issue of init system support recently came to the Technical
Committee's attention again.[1]
For the record, the TC expects maintainers to continue to support
the multiple available init systems in Debian. That includes
merging reasonable contributions, and not reverting existing
support without a compelling reason.
[1] See #746715 for background.
==== END OF RESOLUTION ====
---------------
That's the kind of crystal clear commitment that helps put at least some
of my concerns to bed - whether this is honored in the breach (e.g., as
part of testing things) remains to be seen - but it's a very good
start. Thanks for the pointer.
That does leave three open questions/concerns in my mind:
1. Whether or not there's a clear statement regarding the installer -
will users be presented with a clear choice of init systems during
installation, or is it going to be left to folks to figure out how to
work around the default installation of systemd?
2. How well backward compatibility and transition is supported during
the, what seems to be inevitable, ultimate prevalence of systemd - i.e.,
how well systemd-shim is supported and how complete and accurate
systemd's support for sysvinit scripts will turn out to be.
3. The general monolithic nature of systemd.
The last is a matter of design philosophy - and potentially one of
vulnerabilities to lurking bugs and security holes.
For 1 & 2 - any pointers to equally clear statements about expectations
and committments, akin to the cited resolution?