Debian reconsiders init-system diversity

1. elogind is not new, it’s been there since before buster *and* is included in the buster release, but the other packages that had a hard dependency on it need to adjust their Depends. (I’ve done this successfully on a buster system by editing two lines in /var/lib/dpkg/status to the effect that even network-manager works.) It’s been usable as-is for some time already, just the “can substitute for systemd” part is new (and almost solved in unstable for a while).

2. “merging” is completely the wrong phrasing. elogind is an alternative, and it must be installed by hand and does not affect the default systemd configuration.

This directly bleeds over into…

3. Md is telling nonsense as usual: the new installations use systemd *because* there are dependencies on it from certain packages many people install. People did not have the *option* to use elogind without going through extreme hoops until very recently in unstable (and even then, switching is… interesting). So the statistics are utterly skewed.