[Arm-netbook] severe systemd bugs (two of them)

[Elena ``of Valhalla'']

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.

-- 
Elena ``of Valhalla''