Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 19, 2019 15:22 UTC (Thu) by Zolko (guest, #99166)
In reply to: Debian votes on init systems by pizza
Parent article: Debian votes on init systems

"then feel free to roll your own distro"

what are you talking about ? It's YOUR lot that wants a change in MY distro, which was happily init-agnostic until some corporate know-better wanted to change all that worked very well for 1/2 century. So if YOU have a NEW need, please roll out YOUR NEW distro instead of hijacking MY traditional one.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 19, 2019 15:38 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> What are you talking about ? It's YOUR lot that wants a change in MY distro

So are you seriously saying that you single-handedly created and maintain Debian? Or perhaps you are saying that it was created solely for you?

> which was happily init-agnostic until some corporate know-better wanted to change all that worked very well for 1/2 century.

FYI, Linux is only 28 years old, and UNIX System V that all of this crap was derived is itself on ly 36 years old.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 19, 2019 19:19 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Debian is closer to init-agnostic now than it was before systemd was adopted as the default system initialization and service supervision system.

Back in wheezy (and presumably before), you had to deliberately break the invariants of the packaging system if you wanted to remove sysvinit, because sysvinit was Essential: yes.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 20, 2019 8:35 UTC (Fri) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (4 responses)

> [...] MY distro, which was happily init-agnostic [...]

Pre-systemd Debian was init-agnostic in the same way Henry Ford allowed buyers of the Model T Ford to choose the color of their car.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 20, 2019 17:01 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (3 responses)

I'm sorry to inform you that customers could indeed choose the colour of their Model T:

But when the Model T first came on the market, customers could get almost any common color… except for black! Blue, gray, green, and red were all available, but not black. The first black Model T didn’t roll off the assembly line until five years later. Towards the end of the Model T’s life, six new colors were introduced, from Royal Maroon to Phoenix Brown to Highland Green.

The Debunker: Did the Model T Ford Only Come in Black?

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 20, 2019 18:33 UTC (Fri) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (2 responses)

> I'm sorry to inform you that customers could indeed choose the colour of their Model T

The "any color provided it's black" period lasted from 1915 to 1925.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 20, 2019 19:17 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

....and that was because the black paint cured/dried much faster than the other colors, allowing the production line to run much faster.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 22, 2019 11:54 UTC (Sun) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Nowadays we'd think it'd be obvious to simply make the line longer and/or split the paint job into multiple queues, but that was far from easy to accomplish, or even think of, in 1915.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 21, 2019 20:20 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

It's YOUR lot that wants a change in MY distro

Note that the decision to make systemd the default init system in Debian GNU/Linux was arrived at through the official decision-making mechanism (by a TC majority vote), and this decision was upheld by the Debian developers as a whole. The Debian project doesn't owe you anything, and for sure you don't get to set the direction for the Debian project. If you don't like what the project does, go find (or make) another distribution.

Debian votes on init systems

Posted Dec 22, 2019 0:39 UTC (Sun) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Hi Ian (or possibly Debra)! I didn't know you had an anonymous user named Zolko on LWN.

Or maybe you didn't mean that Debian is literally your brainchild? Maybe you just mean that you're a long-time user? Well, guess what, a lot of people are. You're not alone.

Debian isn't your distribution any more than it's anyone else's. If you're a long-time Debian Developer you might possibly lay a bit more claim to it than others, but even so, it's not yours. The people who do the work gets to decide what direction Debian heads in. We have, and we picked systemd; both for pragmatical reasons (it's good to standardise) but also for technical reasons (it's simply the best option available).

Just because sysvinit is enough for your particular use-cases doesn't mean that it's sufficient for everyone.

This is free software. You're free to fork. Of course there's already been one attempt at a fork of Debian for the sole purpose of removing systemd. You could give it a try.