Re: Who's locking down the code?

[Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org>]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 12:51:22AM +1100, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
> These reasons alone are quite significant and I don't want any of the
> systems that I maintain being effected by these risks.

You should do one of the following

a) switch to a source-based distribution where you can easily disable
   a distro-wide dependency with something like Gentoo's USE flags

b) rebuild the effected packages in Debian from source, disabling the
   systemd dependency and install your locally-built package,

b.1.) where this is not achievable via setting something in
      DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS, write a patch to add this functionality to the
      source package and submit it to the BTS (priority wishlist). If you
      aren't able to write the patch yourself, request one (again priority
      wishlist)

b.2.) Acknowledging that rebuilding packages on Debian is not as convenient
      as using a source-based distribution, perhaps by following a mixture
      of a) to gain experience of how they work, and b) to gain experience
      of how well that works; draft a proposal for how the experience in
      Debian could be improved in a way compatible with the "normal" way
      of operation. Perhaps a tool could be written to make a list of
      packages which you (the user) wants to have built from source, with
      a default DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS setting, that can be triggered when a new
      source package version is available, so upgrades are (more) seamless.
      If you have something concrete enough, consider starting
      a "Debian Enhancement Proposal"[1]. Otherwise, a draft proposal would
      be on-topic for debian-devel.

[1] http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep0/

-- 
Jonathan Dowland