Bug#765803: Status of prompting / notification on upgrade for init system switch?

[Russ Allbery]

Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

> Tollef Fog Heen claimed in
>  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746578#134
> that there is consensus on debian-devel in favour of the switch.

That was some time ago, and Martin has expressed a different opinion.  I
think the systemd team should have a chance to talk this over internally
and see if they still feel that this is the right choice for Debian.  (I
know that we're on a bit of a schedule here due to the freeze.)

> In earlier messages you have framed some of these bugs as requests to
> overrule particular maintainers, whose packages had dependencies which
> were causing this switch.

> I think the principle, of whether this switch should be made
> automatic, ought to be addressed separately, and should be regarded as
> a question of overlapping jurisdictions.  We can't have different
> maintainers fighting over init on users' systems by publishing
> packages with dependencies which result in their preferred setup.

The primary question that's obviously a maintainer override is the order
of dependencies in libpam-systemd, and I still think we can reach a
consensus there without the TC needing to rule on something.

> I think we should therefore issue a set of general guidance along the
> lines of the draft I just posted.

I believe it would be a mistake to start doing that without giving the
systemd maintainers a chance to discuss Martin's message and the overall
issue, and to decide if there's actually a conflict here.

> Your objection that you feel we hadn't decided at the time could be
> addressed by altering para 3 of my draft to read:

>   3. The TC does not feel that our decision should extend to switching
>      existing Debian GNU/Linux installations from sysvinit to systemd.
>      Nor do we think that those users should be prompted to switch init
>      system.

If you're proposing this as a resolution of #765803, that's fine.  I
haven't decided if that's something I'd agree with yet or not.

However, I was under the impression that you were proposing that we issue
a resolution, independent of #765803, that clarifies our February
decision.  I was trying to say that I think that might be a reasonable
course of action, but it would need to just say that our February decision
didn't express an opinion about upgrades.  That's how I understood it, at
least; the other members of the TC can obviously weigh in if they
disagree.  In *that* context, paragraph 3 (and 4) of your proposal are
obviously out of place and shouldn't be included.

It may be that I just misunderstood the context of your proposal, given
that, now that I re-read it, it sounds like you were aiming for a
resolution of #765803 all along.  In which case I'm just confused, and
what I'm arguing about isn't even what you were intending.  :)

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