McRae: Are We Removing What Defines Arch Linux?

Posted Aug 16, 2012 13:06 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

There is a large number of Debian developers, many of whom may indeed think that supporting kfreebsd is stupid (at least if it holds back the Linux version), and many of whom may not have decided for themselves yet. However, barring a general resolution to the contrary, it only takes a small handful of people who are actively keen on supporting Debian/kfreebsd to keep the thing alive, just like it only takes small handfuls of other people to keep other more or less outlandish software packages in Debian. On the whole this is probably a good thing.

The proper way of handling this, IMHO, is to make systemd the default for Debian on Linux, amend policy to declare systemd unit files mandatory for packages implementing background services on any platform, and provide support for other platforms by adding an automatic method to derive an SysV-style init script (or whatever those platforms need) from a package's systemd unit file if no init script was provided by the maintainers. The GSoC project mentioned elsewhere seems to be a reasonable step in that direction.