Hacker News Reader

Comment by irl_ | Hacker News Reader

Debian doesn't actually have anything against sysvinit or OpenRC. Those are just not the defaults. Both sysvinit and OpenRC are available in Debian.

It probably would be easier to have a non-systemd system were the Devuan developers to upstream their packaging and patches to Debian.

As Devuan has a stated goal of not using systemd though, I would guess they take the easy route of not maintaining systemd compatibility. The longer it remains a fork without effort to upstream changes, the more it would diverge and the more work it would be. It would also be more work to keep the fork going, so I guess at some point it would either have to be a hard fork or it would die.

View on HN

From 2014-06-11 systemd news:

> * The support for SysV and LSB init scripts has been removed from the systemd daemon itself. Instead, it is now implemented as a generator that creates native systemd units from these scripts when needed. This enables us to remove a substantial amount of legacy code from PID 1, following the fact that many distributions only ship a very small number of LSB/SysV init scripts nowadays.

At the earliest possible opportunity, systemd removed everything they could that supported alternative init systems. So no, it is not trivial to take a Debian release and make it run SysVinit or OpenRC. In fact, it was so much work that the Devuan devs expended the effort to fork, including setting up a website, mailing lists, IRC channels, a bug-tracker, and all the other infrastructure necessary to maintain a serious, well-supported distro.

And as far as "upstreaming" to Debian, how is Debian upstream for SysVinit or OpenRC? Both of those are separate projects not owned by Debian.

> So no, it is not trivial to take a Debian release and make it run SysVinit or OpenRC.

It is: "apt install sysvinit-core". For some reason, we still carry the burden of maintaining compatibility with many init systems while the "pro-choice" players don't.

> And as far as "upstreaming" to Debian, how is Debian upstream for SysVinit or OpenRC? Both of those are separate projects not owned by Debian.

Until recently, sysvinit was maintained by Debian.

So changing an implementation detail how the support for sysvinit scripts for systemd works means they "removed everything they could"? That's a strange way to put it.

And if "apt-get install sysvinit-core" is not trivial for you, then yes, you might need a special distribution doing that for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com