Dear all, I'm sincerely grateful to technical committee members for their dedication and relentless effort to thoroughly research and understand the issue in order to make the best decision possible.
Although most arguments for and against various init systems were already presented I think I still have something to add. I apologise in advance to some who might consider my feedback to be obvious or redundant. This is the first time ever I'm sharing my concerns regarding init system for Debian. I think well-balanced decision on this subject would benefit from not being too technical. For instance due to controversial contributor's agreement Upstart is pretty much defunct project. Many contributors prefer to spend their time on something else rather than Upstart. If adopted Upstart will likely turn into a big liability for Debian. The very survival of Upstart may depend on whether we going to be involved or not. Canonical/Ubuntu would be very happy to use Debian resources for Upstart as if they succeed in "selling" Upstart to Debian they would be able to offload (i.e. outsource) a significant chunk of effort that they have to dedicate to Upstart development and maintenance otherwise. It is quite possible that Ubuntu might reduce their involvement to Upstart (and "allow" Debian to deal with problems) while they are likely to spend more of their resources formerly allocated to Upstart to contribute to other areas of "added value". (IMHO the only major Ubuntu sell point is a concept of "added value" on top of Debian.) In my opinion Canonical/Ubuntu will benefit the most from Upstart adoption in Debian. Considering the possibility that in the future Ubuntu might abandon Upstart, Debian may end up with unwanted/obsolete init system. Since Upstart future is uncertain I fear that we might waste a lot of precious resources for Upstart and/or potentially became de-facto upstream for Upstart. IMHO from this prospective Upstart shall not be considered as alternative init system at all. Indeed I'm concerned about conflict of interests from DDs affiliated with Canonical and Ubuntu. When they advocate for Upstart I doubt they have Debian's best interests in mind. There is a danger for Debian to be overrun by outsiders or to fall under their influence even if some of them are working on both sides. Besides we can learn from OpenSUSE where Upstart was replaced with Systemd. Even without much investigation it should be fairly clear that there are good reasons not to use Upstart and to prefer something else. As for Systemd I do not fear its adoption. On the bright side it would be nice to reduce our differences with other distros in that area. Systemd may open some exciting opportunities to cooperate and join the efforts with other influential distros. Our users may benefit from feature rich init system and its adoption might make it easier for new users to switch to Debian. It doesn't look like Systemd survival will be influenced much from Debian involvement so from non-technical prospective Systemd is better for us due to strong upstream and wide(r) adoption. Of course there are concerns regarding integration between Systemd and GNOME but that's a different issue and perhaps not a major one as long as we use GNOME as default desktop environment. Besides GNOME already became notorious for being intrusive (e.g. it depends on "pulseaudio" etc.). Also I'd like to notice that shopping for most feature-rich init system might be not our goal after all. OpenRC may be the safest choice that might satisfy majority of developers as it appears to have the least number of objections. I have impression that OpenRC have far less passionate opponents than Systemd. Finally I'm sure everybody is already getting exhausted by long debates about this topic. At this point it might be tempting to approach on decision, any decision, to put this to end. This is a way to make mistakes of judgement. Unless there is a rush we all need to slow down and perhaps even take a break for several weeks to clear our heads and make a balanced, well thought decision. Taking break may be beneficial for the quality of decision making. -- Cheers, Dmitry Smirnov GPG key : 4096R/53968D1B --- Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers' feelings. -- Richard Stallman
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