On Tue, Oct 20, 2026 at 10:01:50AM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
On Tue, 20 Oct 2026 at 00:42:33 +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
I would like to write package dependencies that a certain package
indicates that it won't work without systemd, most prominently that
it would NOT work with sysvinit.
What feature(s) of systemd? I know systemd's detractors often say it's
monolithic, but it's actually quite modular, and the down side of that
is that dependent packages do need to know which parts they are
depending on.
In this case, its systemd service unit is quite sophisticated and
reaches a level of security that I have never even seen TRIED to achive
in an init script. There is no init script, and the "cron job" which is
actually invoked by systemd timer in the package, will horriby break
with sysvinit.
If the same transition had been done today, I think we'd probably have
packages named init-is-systemd and init-is-sysvinit, with the same
meaning as what's currently systemd-sysv and sysvinit-core
respectively.
All this should be documented.
Greetings
Marc
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