I was unable to reproduce this with the current sysvinit package in jessie (2.88dsf-57).
What I did: * installed wheezy in a VM * altered /etc/apt/sources.list adding jessie URLs * apt-get update * apt-get install apt dpkg locales * apt dist-upgrade * reboot At this point the system was running with systemd. * apt install sysvinit-core (nothing odd here, installation went normally) * reboot At this point the system was running with sysvinit. Sorry for not providing logs from the susvinit-core installation, I was unable to get the serial console of the VM to work. HTH, dam -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org