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Re: GR: Selecting the default init system for Debian



On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 08:58:08AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Le Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 01:01:44AM +0100, Guillem Jover a écrit :

> > I think that forcing a decision through the TC at this time was very
> > premature and inappropriate, because I don't think enough effort had
> > been made to reach consensus (failing §6.3(6))

> I agree that calling the TC was premature.

> We have a default init system that has the Essential flag, and it is
> impossible to switch to alternatives without going through a very strong
> warning.

Factually incorrect.  The sysvinit package in unstable has been fixed to
depend on sysvinit-core | upstart | systemd-sysv, allowing users to switch
between init systems without removing an essential package.

> In my understanding, to have GNOME 3.10 in Debian, we need to work around
> this difficulty.

Not true, on multiple axes.

> In that sense, the call to the TC was premature: we should remove
> obstacles for change, and only top-down decide when some ways are
> incompatible in a way that is affecting a large number of users.  If one
> day it is not possible to have Desktop manager A and Desktop manager B
> installed on the same machine, the solution may be simply to call this
> "unsupported" unless there is a significant demand for this feature.

A decision needs to be made about the default init system.  Like other
questions of defaults, it's not clearly the remit of any particular
maintainer or maintenance team in Debian.  Such things tend to be decided by
fiat by the installer team, but in this case that's not possible; the
presence of the Essential flag on the sysvinit package historically means
that the change of default must be made by coordination with the sysvinit
maintainers.

If you want to avoid a TC decision, I suppose that as a regular committer to
the sysvinit package I could just take it upon myself to set upstart as the
default.  But I thought that it might be better to have a slightly less
unilateral decision-making approach.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org

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