On Thu, 19 Feb 2026, Andrew Bower wrote:
>On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 09:49:39AM +0300, Aldemir Akpinar wrote:
>> (Reading database ... 27088 files and directories currently installed.)
>> Removing systemd (257.9-1~deb13u1) ...
>> systemd is the active init system, please switch to another before
>> removing systemd.
>
>I don't believe you needed to include 'systemd-' in this command line -
>you do that as a second step after reboot, as before.
Ah, oops. I install systems with debootstrap these days and always
change inits before booting into them, so I forgot.
>I don't think this is necessary. Sorry, I think the wiki page needs
>rewriting.
Yes, definitely.
>I have never done this - perhaps it was necessary in the
>past. It seems the optimal instructions are a hybrid of the "at
>installation time" and "at runtime" instructions.
No. We truly need separate instructions per Debian release,
especially as apt also changed (it doesn’t show the “Yes, do
as I say!” prompt any more, just fails to do what the user
requested, and the manpage explicitly doesn’t say that the
fix for that is --allow-remove-essential, and the maintainer
thinks that’s okay… 😾
>> I used to do an apt-get install sysvinit-core, reboot, and apt-get
>> remove systemd. It always worked from jessie to bookworm.
>
>Sorry for having directed you to the wiki when it merely added confusion
>- I didn't realise how out of date it was.
Yeah, we really need updated instructions. Probably best
also include o-s-s, as that has become good as mandatory
with at least bookworm.
>> I feel like debian doesn't care about choice anymore, becoming just
>> another redhat clone.
Yeah… we literally got told that Debian “was never about choice” 😿
>ifupdown is already "Priority: important" so I'm not sure why you didn't
>have it already installed.
New installs won’t have it any more, they now use network-manager on
one kind of installs and netplan(?) or something else even worse on
others (one is servers, the other is desktops/laptops, I forgot which
is which, dropped it and installed ifupdown as I wanted).
Note that trixie has udhcpc-base instead of isc-dhcp-client by default
as the latter is EOL since 2021 and not security-supported in trixie
any more, but this will also cause trouble and changes. The ifupdown
maintainer tries his best to get things working, but this really needs
patches in udhcpc, which the udhcpc maintainer refuses to even discuss.
🤬 But in trixie at least, you can still install isc-dhcp-client on
systems you don’t want these experiments on.
Point of order, I don’t think this is a bug in the package, and we
probably should control-close this. However, we NEED a working wiki
page, and I’d like to suggest another improvement: the Description
field of the relevant binary package(s) should gain a paragraph to
say that a normal apt-get install will not work with them on systems
currently booted with another init, that that is expected, and that
the wiki page (URL here) contains the necessary procedure.
I think this could even get into stable-p-u.
bye,
//mirabilos
--
Yes, I hate users and I want them to suffer.
-- Marco d'Itri on gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
