On 2017-07-03 at 11:34:29 -0400, Jonathan Frederickson wrote:
The distro maintainers have to manage their (often limited and unpaid) time wisely. In Debian's case, choosing systemd as the init system means that package maintainers only have to write much shorter systemd service files instead of longer sysvinit-style startup scripts. As a developer, I can certainly understand that decision.
for the sake of accuracy, I'd like to point out that Debian's developers are still adding sysvinit startup scripts, or at least maintaining the existing ones (altought "patches welcome" is very much the approach in the case of new ones).
sysvinit is still a supported init system in Debian (and still the default on the non-linux port, which are not release architectures but are still pretty maintained); the main reason why this may change in the future is if there is no longer anybody who cares about it enough to at least report bugs, but ideally also support the developement¹.
what is not supported is having a system that is completely purged of any reference to the systemd libraries, even if they just point to shim code, because that would require distributing multiple binary packages for a lot of source packages, and that is not really suitable to the way debian works.
The main victim to debian choosing to default on systemd, up to now, has been upstrart, and that only because upstream (Canonical) stopped supporting it. However, from the point of view of independence from a single corporation that would have been even worse.
Perhaps software freedom alone is no longer enough, and in some cases I agree. But in this case, I don't think I can fault Debian (as a volunteer project) for not wanting to do work they don't have to.
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.
¹ 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.