Re: Legitimate exercise of our constitutional decision-making processes [Was, Re: Tentative summary of the amendments]
On 28 October 2014 18:20, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> With all of those facilities, we've taken different approaches; with the
> mail transport agent, for example, we've defined an interface that all
> mail transport agents are required to implement, and MTA implementations
> that don't implement that interface aren't allowed to provide a mail
> transport agent. We did something similar with /bin/sh. With udev, on
> the other hand, we basically required everyone run udev; it's
> theoretically possible to boot a system without udev, but it's not tested
> and I think everyone would agree that it's not supported. For the
> compiler, all of Debian is built with GCC, but some teams do test builds
> with Clang and report bugs, which most maintainers merge and some don't.
> And with libc, we do not even allow for the possibility of replacing the
> system libc; you use glibc if you're using Debian on Linux, and that's the
> end of that.
This is an interesting insight. It also can be used to identify
possible solutions for the current issue:
* if we go the MTA/sh route, then we define lowest common denominator
interface of an init system and only init systems providing that
(possibly with a systemd-shim) can be init systems in the archive and
also applications can only depend on presence of these particular
interfaces;
* if we go udev/gcc/glibc route, then we just say that all other init
systems are not supported, put systemd as essential and push all other
init systems to extra or even out of the archive;
With enough imagination it is possible to see the original GR proposal
as implementing the first option in a obtuse way.
--
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs mailto:aigarius@debian.org
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