On Mon, Jul 03, 2017 at 06:32:00PM -0400, zap wrote:
Indeed, volunteer time is seriously limited, and there are things that are just beyond what can be expected from them.
E.g. if a mayor DE would start requiring systemd to work, Debian would not be in the position to fork it, but that doesn't mean that non-systemd users will be forced to migrate to systemd, just that they would have to use one of the many other DE available in Debian.
ยน this is not that unlikely, however: there have been a number of calls for help because the numbers of complaints on the mailing list is much higher than the number of people actually giving even a tiny bit of help in ensuring that sysvinit continues to be tested and supported in Debian, and if nobody tests it, eventually it will bitrot and stop working.
That is why, runit and openrc are badly needed as options but no matter what, the developers of debian had no right to force all packages to require systemd if they are calling their distro "universally free or free software" because that is the opposite of how free software is supposed to work.
Openrc is included in Debian. If anybody asked me to add support for its configs for whatever packages I maintain, I guess the approach would likewise be "patches are wellcomed", but there are also no packaging tools for that, which makes the required patches larger, I believe.
I would probably also not be able to easily be able to debug those.