Bug#747535: Please don't make upgrades noisier than necessary

[Josh Triplett]

If the maintainers of the packages involved have done their jobs well
(and they have), upgrading should be an entirely smooth process.  Much
like upgrading to a new version of the Linux kernel or a new bootloader,
you won't actually get the new version until you reboot, so there may be
value in a "you need to reboot" reminder after finishing the upgrade,
but that's true for just about every Debian major release upgrade.
However, adding a new prompt *before* the upgrade just makes the upgrade
process that much less pleasant for everyone who *doesn't* actually hold
religious opinions about init systems, which in practice is a far
greater chunk of Debian users than those who do.  In practice, upgrading
from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 will have a more noticeable impact on the user,
and we don't nag the user with a debconf prompt about that either, nor
should we.

Upgrading from one Debian major release to another makes a large number
of substantial changes to the system; for example, it may replace
module-init-tools with the completely reimplemented kmod-based tools.
Those changes don't merit debconf noise either.

Now, what *would* make a great deal of sense would be moving this bug
over to the release notes, writing an explanation of the systemd
transition for the jessie release notes, and documenting in those
release notes how to select a non-default init system.

- Josh Triplett