Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2013 1:46 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
Parent article: Which init system for Debian?

At the moment, with the decision currently being deferred to the Technical Committee, and with several TC members already having a stated preference for upstart and a pile of complaints posted about systemd and GNOME's use of it (along with NetworkManager and other modern conveniences), I fully expect the TC to either opt for "support everything" (the current status quo) or for upstart (opting to follow Ubuntu rather than the rest of the Linux-using world).

If only the switch to XFCE by default would avoid the complaints about GNOME depending on systemd that prompted this whole mess of a discussion in the first place.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2013 6:54 UTC (Wed) by corsac (subscriber, #49696) [Link] (1 responses)

Do you honestly think changing the desktop to Xfce will change anything about this issue?

Xfce also relies on the underlying middleware for basic functions like reacting on system events (LID switch, power buttons, suspend/hibernate buttons etc).

Xfce project had a hard time keeping up with all the rewrites (hal, devicekit, upower etc.), and now that upower is dropping the support for system events (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/devkit-devel/2013-J...), there's not much choice than going systemd/logind, unless someone else provides some code to do that directly in the desktop.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2013 12:32 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> Do you honestly think changing the desktop to Xfce will change anything about this issue?

I more meant that perhaps making GNOME no longer the default would give the GNOME packages more leeway to go with upstream rather than becoming an increasingly large distro fork. Then perhaps by the time XFCE started (directly or indirectly) depending on systemd as well, it would look a little more inevitable.

It took a very long time for Debian to accept dependencies on udev. It'll probably take that long again to accept dependencies on systemd.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2013 11:47 UTC (Wed) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]

Gnome (the GDM) part of gnome doesn't rely on logind (part of systemd).

http://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-logi...

There was a problem in openRC where it could start programs but not stop them properly. Gentoo people freaked out about it instead of fixing it. Eventually the gnome devs fixed the bug in openRC.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 7, 2013 13:43 UTC (Thu) by aba (guest, #24118) [Link] (2 responses)

I haven't see that "several TC members stated a preference for upstart". Contrary, I have seen that several TC members have asked critical questions on all init systems in question, some more technical, some more roadmap-like, some on development capacity etc, and up to now the questions regarding upstart are more critical than those against systemd. I don't think the outcome is obvious yet; contrary, it will depend much on the answers to the questions which are asked now.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 9, 2013 6:51 UTC (Sat) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (1 responses)

> I haven't see that "several TC members stated a preference for upstart".

Considering that one TC member (Steve) is listed on the debate page as the maintainer of the upstart position statement which is accompanied by a link to a DebConf talk he (co-)held titled "Why Debian needs Upstart" I can certainly see how one would arrive at such a conclusion. ;-)

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 20, 2013 18:38 UTC (Wed) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

That seems more like 'one' than 'several'.