Re: Alternative proposal: reaffirm maintainers technical competence over the software they maintain

[Luca Falavigna <dktrkranz@debian.org>]

Hi,

Thank you for your feedback!

2014-10-18 13:50 GMT+02:00 The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm>:
> Imagine that the maintainer of package foo decides, as they are entitled
> to do under this proposal, that 'foo requires upstart for proper
> operation' (choosing upstart just as an example here), and adds a
> dependency on a hypothetical set-upstart-as-PID-1 package.
>
> Imagine then that someone who is running happily with systemd as PID 1
> decides to install package foo.
>
> This would cause their system to be switched from systemd as PID 1 to
> upstart as PID 1, comparably to what now happens when someone who is not
> running with systemd as PID 1 installs a package which depends on
> systemd-sysv.

I consider out of scope for this proposal to discuss a method to prevent an
accidental change of default init system, even though I'd welcome such
a technical feature to be designed sooner than later.

> Yet under this proposal, the package maintainers would be fully entitled
> to do exactly the things which necessarily result in this problematic
> scenario.

I will emphasize a couple of sentences in my proposal:
  Debian packages *may* require a specific init system [...]
  [...] if their maintainers consider this a *requisite* [...]
  [...] *and* no patches or other derived works exist [...]
  [...] to support other init systems.

I consider requiring a specific init system as a last resort when every
possible technical solution failed, and nobody stepped in to provide
alternative solutions not considered before.

Note that I didn't use "should", but "may", as I don't consider this
proposal a suggestion to avoid providing valid technical solutions to
support other init systems, especially if this may turn to be a quite
trivial exercise.

Cheers,
Luca