I said this in another message, but I'm not sure I was sufficiently explicit, so I'm going to try again to inject a bit more reality into this thread.
The next step for looking at alternative init systems is finalizing the Policy changes that are required to support alternative init systems. That discussion is happening separately in debian-policy (and is largely complete). I believe there's already general consensus around documenting what people *can* do if they choose to add such support, with the explicit requirement that sysvinit scripts continue to be supported. At that point, we can start actually testing Debian with alternative init systems and individual packagers can decide whether to add support for specific alternative init systems like upstart or systemd or continue to rely on their init system emulation. This will give us considerably more data about many things: what benefits we can see from this approach, how difficult it is for the early adopters to write upstart or systemd configuration, what a transition would look like, and so forth, without causing any harm to the rest of Debian or doing anything irreversible. It will also let us *do* things and see whether they work rather than just *talking* about things, which is usually a substantial improvement. This is very similar to the approach that was taken for rolling out dependency-based boot. Once we have that practical experience and a Policy framework in which we can do that experiment, we will have considerably more data and will be able to have a more informed debate. I think the current argument has reached the point where it's a waste of everyone's time. We have a pretty good idea of what we're doing in the short run, none of the discussion we're currently having is particularly relevant to that, and much of the discussion is speculation without data that we'll be able to acquire later. Worse, I think it has degraded to the point where a small number of people with strongly held views are basically repeating their views at each other without any hope of anyone changing their mind. This is bad, since it hardens everyone's views and makes it more difficult for everyone later to reconsider in the light of additional evidence and possibly change their minds. People can certainly continue talking about this if they want to and feel like they have something significantly new to add, but I'd ask everyone to seriously consider just letting this conversation end right now and revisit the discussion later when we have more information and a better framework in which to have it. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ehtforcr....@windlord.stanford.edu
