Debian TC vote on init system coupling

Posted Feb 24, 2014 10:37 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Debian TC vote on init system coupling by dakas
Parent article: Debian TC vote on init system coupling

Nobody is telling the developers of Debian GNU/HURD and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to stop what they're doing. The situation remains exactly the same as it was before; there are people who are interested in spending time on porting Debian to alternative kernels, and these people will be expected to do most of the work. They in turn do not get to tell the rest of the Debian developer community what they should or should not do. This is how free software generally works; you scratch your own itch.

It should also be pointed out that it is a fallacy to believe that currently all of Debian runs on the FreeBSD or HURD kernels, and that systemd will be an exception because it won't. Many other packages also don't work on the alternative kernels, so it is not as if Debian/HURD or Debian/kFreeBSD offered users the same experience as Debian/Linux even now. In that sense they remain experimental, »fringe« versions of the distribution; they are proofs of concept to see whether porting Debian will even work, not necessarily the sort of reliable workhorse people are expecting when they think »Debian GNU/Linux«. As such they should be put firmly in perspective.

Having said that, Debian package maintainers are encouraged by Debian policy to address portability problems that lead to bugs in their packages on Linux architectures other than the ones they're using themselves, and on non-Linux platforms. They are, however, not required to go to the trouble of actively testing their packages on all architectures and kernels supported by Debian or to engage into large development projects in order to port packages whose upstream versions are not portable; we just want them to listen to relevant bug reports, and evaluate and possibly incorporate suggested portability fixes.

In the init system context, this means that, while package maintainers will be asked to support the default init system on their platform, they should also be open to bug reports from people who are interested in making the packages in question run with other init systems. In other words, on a very basic level a System-V init script is currently sufficient to make a package work on all Debian platforms (with or without systemd). A package maintainer will be encouraged to package an equivalent systemd unit file but they will not be forced to come up with it themselves unless they want to.