Debian To Seek A General Resolution Over Their Init System Policy

[anticapitalista]

I won't be surprised if the next Debian Stable release is systemd only.
I think the writing was on the wall once Fedora and Gnome jumped on that ship.

Debian stable stretch and buster was/is already systemd only.

[KBD]

I won't be surprised if the next Debian Stable release is systemd only.
I think the writing was on the wall once Fedora and Gnome jumped on that ship.

Debian stable stretch and buster was/is already systemd only.

But can't you run another init system on it?
I'm thinking that will be impossible by Debian 11 Stable.

[BitJam]

But can't you run another init system on it [Buster, Stretch]?

It hasn't been easy, I assure you. It took a lot of work.

[jeffreyC]

This should come as no surprise, just like the previous quote vote unquote this was rigged for systemd to be the only possible winner.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I won't be surprised if the next Debian Stable release is systemd only.
I think the writing was on the wall once Fedora and Gnome jumped on that ship.

Debian stable stretch and buster was/is already systemd only.

But can't you run another init system on it?

Yes, it is possible to run any of three officially supported init systems in Debian stable:

https://packages.debian.org/buster/init

This is one more than Devuan, interestingly :-)

I can't get to a graphical desktop under buster with anything other than systemd but running a server with one of the other init systems is certainly possible and Debian are working on improving support. They even have a mailing list dedicated to init diversity upon which any problems can be discussed:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/mailm ... -diversity

this was rigged for systemd to be the only possible winner

If the majority of developers vote for option E (and leave the other options un-checked) then Debian will be forced to support alternative init systems so that statement would appear to be false.

[timkb4cq]

...Debian are working on improving support. They even have a mailing list dedicated to init diversity upon which any problems can be discussed:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/mailm ... -diversity

Now that was an eye opener!

Question on init diversity thread:

>> I think it would be time when OpenRC has a systemd .ini parser, to
>> also make use of systemd units.
> Do you think this could be written?

Answer by Sysvinit maintainer:

This is something we've been looking at in SysV init. We have a script
than translates systemd unit files to shell scripts. However, we don't
have a service manager that parses them on the fly finished yet. We can
go through dependencies and perform simple actions, but there is a ways
to go yet. OpenRC would be welcome to borrow our code for this.

italics mine for emphasis.
Getting that done would take away a lot of the arguments against maintaining init diversity - especially those from maintainers who don't want to support sysvinit scripts anymore.

[Richard]

This should come as no surprise, just like the previous quote vote unquote this was rigged for systemd to be the only possible winner.

Yes.
Reading the voting instructions,
they are clearly biased for only one outcome --systemd only.