Status of prompting / notification on upgrade for init system switch?

[Russ Allbery]

Hello, systemd maintainers.

We (the Technical Committee) have received a request to override a
maintainer decision around whether systems are switched from sysvinit to
systemd on upgrade.  However, it's not clear to me that an actual decision
has been made that we would need to override.

There have been multiple (fairly high-noise) discussions in debian-devel
about this, and some previous concrete design discussion, but in all of
the other, mostly unproductive threads on this topic, I've lost track of
status or the current proposed approach.

When one of you has a chance, could you update this bug with the current
thinking around how to handle upgrades, around the ordering of
dependencies in libpam-systemd, and some of the other ideas (such as
attempting to detect systems with /etc/inittab configuration or init
scripts that don't follow systemd's assumptions) raised in those threads?

I would be particularly interested in your take on the analysis that Steve
Langasek posted to the debian-devel thread on why listing systemd-shim as
the first alternative dependency for libpam-systemd makes sense and should
not cause any negative effects for systemd users.

Thanks!

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>