Debian Project Drafts General Resolution on Init-System Diversity

guest · Nov 17, 2019

Debian reconsiders init-system diversity
November 12, 2019
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/804254/71240d6b83844653/

Many community-based Linux distributions have made the decision to switch to systemd, and most of those decisions were accompanied by lengthy, sometimes acrimonious mailing-list discussions.
No distribution had a harder time of it than Debian, though, where arguments raged through much of 2013 before the Debian Technical Committee decided on systemd in early 2014.

Now, though, the topic has returned to the fore and it would appear that the project is heading toward a new general resolution (GR) to decide at what level init systems other than systemd should be supported.
Feature pressure
Unsurprisingly, Debian developers have a variety of opinions on this issue. This response from Russ Allbery is worth reading in its entirety. He argues that the 2014 decision (of which he was a part) never really nailed down the project's position toward other init systems.

Josh Triplett zeroed in on one of the issues that is testing the init-system peace now. There is, he said, an increasingly long list of features that are only available with systemd, and application developers want to use those features: [...]
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Others, including Triplett, said that not only do the developers of other init systems lack the desire to implement systemd features, but they argue that those features should not exist in the first place.

That, Allbery added, is the question that the project has to answer: what will be Debian's policy toward software that requires features that will be specific to systemd? Should there be a specific subset of systemd features that Debian software will be allowed to depend on, with the idea that alternative init systems will eventually gain implementations of those features?
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The first GR draft
Hartman posted a draft general resolution on November 7 that does not directly address Allbery's question. It focused strongly on init systems, rather than support for advanced systemd features; there are three alternatives:

"Affirm init diversity": running init systems other than systemd is an important project goal, and provision of init scripts would remain mandatory.

"Systemd but we support exploring alternatives": systemd would be the preferred init system, but alternatives would remain important; elogind is given as an example of the sort of project that should be supported. Hartman posted another message with a detailed description of what this option might imply.

"Systemd without diversity as a priority": there would be no requirement to support anything but systemd in Debian.

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guest · Dec 28, 2019

The Debian Project has announced the results of its vote on how much to support non-systemd init systems.
General Resolution: Init systems and systemd
https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002

Voting Period: Saturday 2019-12-07 00:00:00 UTC - Friday 2019-12-27 23:59:59 UTC

The winners

Option 2 "B: Systemd but we support exploring alternatives"

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