The Debian init system general resolution returns

Therefor fearing that such software may be created in the future is not someone being a fearmonger or being deceitful, instead it's someone expecting that what was done before will be done again.

If Gnome no longer requires systemd, that's a good thing. It's also what the response should have been in the first place rather than taking the attitude that doing anything other than forcing everyone to switch to systemd was putting an unreasonable burden on Gnome.

I would take that "support" with a very and I mean very much grain of salt.

systemd-shim package is a futile attempt since the goal that it has to aim for, keeps moving around. There are no stability promises on a core functionality logind uses and as a result of that has left systemd-shim broken for months before and will do so again each and everytime it's (afaik sole ) maintainer Steve Langasek has to play catchup with upstream changes.

Now as it's name indicated requires you to still have systemd installed so the Debian community has the choice of using a) An component which is busy chasing rainbows and developed/maintained by single individual or b) Use systemd with logind and all the other bells and whistle systemd provides which is backup by Tollef Fog Heen, Michael Biebl, Marco d'Itri, Michael Stapelberg, Sjoerd Simon and the entire upstream systemd community.

Now let's return to the core of the matter, the work required by the Debian, ( as well as Gentoo,Slackware and whomever intents to support multiple and or use alternative init system than systemd whatever they may be called uselessd,openrc,sysvinit etc in the long run ) community has to come up with ( and the systembsd maintainer bumped into as well and significantly slowed down the development or grounded his development to halt entirely ).

In *addition* having to carry downstream compatibility patches for all upstream components that have decided to integrate/use what systemd provides them with *beside* logind and the added load on the service support community ( help,qa,releng etc ) and it's maintainers that will bring, they will need to write and thus provide a daemon that provides the external, supported, and guaranteed stable "login" API, an daemon that maps the "login" API to the non-portable operating-system-specific underpinnings which is an hefty chunk of development work.

You cant workaround this problem in apt through some dependency/resolving magic and you wont achieve this with something like systemd-shim or have it magically appear by whining about it on mailing lists, in forum, and various comment sections or by continually coming up with GR's and the likes, you actually need to get your hands dirty and start doing that hefty coding period.

Ian and his followers are doing pretty good job disrupting the Debian community from doing what needs to be done to make Jessie the most awesome release ever ( integrate it to the best of it's ability to systemd. I've been midst in this integration work myself and I know how much it pains users have things half integrated, half migrated and thus half working ) and ensuring Jessie will become the worst release ever by having no init working reliably since him and his followers are not coming up with components and the code necessary to do so.

I just sincerely hope for the sake of Debian that the DD will vote for Luca Falavigna proposal ( Choice 3 ) which will put this power into the hands of the maintainers themselves since I know quite few of them know the reality for what it is but have chosen to keep themselves outside any ( systemd ) discussion and mud sliding.