Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 12, 2013 10:18 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Which init system for Debian? by anselm
Parent article: Which init system for Debian?

> I think that if Debian does decide to change its default init system there will be a huge emphasis on »keeping things working«

This is one of the things I trust Debian (and Gentoo) to do well, they provide options rather than picking the 'one true way'

I would not be thrilled if Debian were to pick systemd as the default, but as long as it remained a requirement that packages work without systemd, it would only be a mild annoyance (very similar to their use of Grub while I still prefer lilo in most cases)

It would only be if they started allowing systemd-only packages as something other than a very rare case that I would have a problem with it.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 12, 2013 10:42 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

I would not be thrilled if Debian were to pick systemd as the default, but as long as it remained a requirement that packages work without systemd, it would only be a mild annoyance

Personally I wouldn't want to bet the farm on this. Your best hope is that the non-Linux Debian platforms will stick with SysV init, and that some support for SysV init remains in Debian policy to cater to those.

Speaking as a Debian developer, one enticing advantage of systemd is no longer having to write SysV init scripts, so I would hope that the Debian policy requirement to do so will eventually go away, or that at the very least we will come up with a way of automatically creating SysV init scripts from systemd unit files. I seem to remember that this is being looked at, and if Debian does decide to go with systemd, I would certainly expect the vocal SysV init aficionados to contribute heavily to that effort.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 12, 2013 13:02 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

You probably mean this:
https://github.com/akhilvij/systemd-to-sysvinit-converter
That project seems to have gone dormant about a year ago.

Which init system for Debian?

Posted Nov 20, 2013 22:53 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

The whole point of switching to systemd would be to throw away piles of ugly compatibility code to try to keep things like (the unmaintained) ConsoleKit limping along.

There's an option under consideration to keep multiple options; that'd be better than sticking with sysvinit for all eternity, but ideally I'd like to see a switch to systemd with sysvinit script compatibility as the default option, thus allowing software to depend on it.

It'll then be up to people who want to keep other init systems going to submit patches supporting them; it shouldn't be the job of every maintainer of software whose upstream relies on systemd to fork it and remove that dependency. If someone wants that, they should "fix" it upstream or fork the project themselves, rather than making Debian do it.