That's probably for the best. Writing init scripts is easy enough for that small percentage of users (like gp) who really need it. Good choice on Debian's part, imho.
The non-systemd crowd wrote elogind in response to this. But of course, now elogind is in a situation like WordPerfect was with Microsoft Word back in the 90's -- trying to remain compatible with a moving target.
So the point of this vote is to answer the question: How does a package manager of a package like the "Gnome desktop" interact with the non-systemd crowd, when they want to depend on a new feature that's in logind but not in elogind?
Option F is basically, "The package manager says, 'systemd is our primary init system; we depend on systemd's logind period.'"
Option B is, "The package manager says, 'I'm making this dependency change. Hope you can manage to get elogind up to scratch before the release; otherwise your package will be broken, but that's not my problem.'"
Options D and H were variants on, "The non-systemd people have 6 months to get elogind up to parity with logind. Before 6 months, a breaking change would have to be reverted before release; after 6 months, a breaking change is allowed in a release."
Personally I think H was the best option; the fact is they're all actually quite close. 425 people voted, and the deltas between them are 22, 31, and 34. The community is really quite divided still.
Despite its editorialized name of "support portability without blocking progress", it had a mandatory 6-12 month waiting period before using any piece of new functionality, and the anti-systemd crowd has demonstrated repeatedly that they'll use any weapon to slow down systemd usage, which means in practice every single new mechanism or upgrade would likely have incurred a 12-month delay.
I think the winning option was optimal: it firmly says "if you want a non-systemd init to work you have to do all the work or convince (not force) others to help you". It means that if people materialize to do the work for a new init (whether a better-than-sysvinit alternative, or some future better-than-systemd alternative), they can do that work, and encourage (but not force) others to do the same.
So, if something comes along that people are excited about because it's actually better, or meaningfully different and not worse, nothing stops developers from rallying behind it and adding support for it.
The same sort of thing is exhibited by the pro-systemd crowd. Here's an example where a maintainer completely refused to engage with someone trying to fix a component required to work with non-systemd systems:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=930869
And the issue I have with 'B' is that it doesn't actually do anything concrete to address this kind of behavior.
> Despite its editorialized name of "support portability without blocking progress", it had a mandatory 6-12 month waiting period before using any piece of new functionality
Debian only does a release every 2 years. If that number were set to '6 months', in practice what that would mean is that if you want to introduce a breaking dependency, you have to introduce it in the first 18 months of a release development, so that the other people in your community have some chance of getting things working before the release. That seems like a basic level of consideration and cooperation.
[Minor edits for clarity.]
I wasn't commenting on that here one way or another. I was observing that this would hand one crowd a new weapon, in the form of a mandatory 6-12 month delay.
(In general, I think the vast majority of the pro-systemd crowd is not interested in actively killing alternatives; they're just interested in actually using features that other alternatives don't have. Problems and disputes certainly happen, as well as people getting frustrated or burnt out trying to deal with the constant battles, as well as people just trying to get things done.)
(I also think many of the anti-systemd crowd is just interested in trying to maintain what they care about, but that in practice it's become evident that "keep up" would require than the available development resources, while the far more acrimonious "slow others down" requires less. I suspect it's a survival/threat response, but that still doesn't make it the right one.)
> Debian only does a release every 2 years.
Many people run the testing or unstable distributions. And in any case, that's not the issue here:
> If that number were set to '6 months', in practice what that would mean is that if you want to introduce a breaking dependency, you have to introduce it in the first 18 months of a release development,
That's not what that proposal said. What it said was that if you want to use any new feature, you'd have to ask first, document it in Policy first (which is not the norm, usually Policy follows experimentation and documents what has become existing practice), make sure it's something that could theoretically work not just on non-systemd but also on non-Linux, then wait "at least 6 months, preferably at least 12 months" to see if someone bothers to make an alternative implementation, before you can actually use it. And any further enhancement to such a mechanism needs another 6-12 months.
That might have sounded reasonable to the developers of software like sysvinit that doesn't actually change anymore, and is mostly in permanent maintenance mode with its current set of features. It doesn't sound at all reasonable regarding actively developed software.
Right, but the problem is, as you say, there's the "unreasonable" 5-10% on both sides that are using "tactics" to block the other agenda and push their own. Option 'B' basically gives all the power to the pro-systemd crowd, because there's no real mechanism to force a stubborn maintainer to even review a patch tweaking things to work without systemd, much less accept it.
Option 'H', it appears to me to be trying to balance things, such that neither side can actually block things for long. I think that's a much better goal to aim for.
(The text of proposal H is at [1] for those following along.)
> That might have sounded reasonable to the developers of software like sysvinit that doesn't actually change anymore, and is mostly in permanent maintenance mode with its current set of features. It doesn't sound at all reasonable regarding actively developed software.
I'm involved in "actively developing" software, and often come across interfaces that I'd like to just throw away and start over; but instead, we have to make a plan to deprecate the old interface over the course of line 10 years.
That's because systems software is all about compatibility. If you wanted to be able to throw everything away every 6 months you should be writing Javascript.
In any case, look at the votes. Of the 425 people who voted, 116 people favored "Support for multiple init systems is Required" over "Focus on systemd"; and most people voted in favor of some option that allows for init system diversity. Diversity of init systems is clearly important to the community as a whole. It seems to me then that guidelines need to be put in place to prevent extremists on either side from imposing their will on the whole community.
> Many people run the testing or unstable distributions.
Indeed, and many of those people want to be able to not run systemd, for a variety of reasons; and most of the community want to accommodate them, at least at some level.
> That's not what that proposal said. What it said was that if you want to use any new feature, you'd have to ask first, document it in Policy first...
That procedure is in a section which specifically says it's about:
> For example, creating system users or temporary directories. Current Debian approaches are often based on debhelper scripts.
That looks to me like it's not about a dependency on random shiny new features; it's about replacing some core Debian functionality with systemd functionality, in a way which affects all users of the system. Given that system diversity, at least at a basic level, is the goal for most Debian maintainers, doesn't it make sense that such a change should be taken carefully?
So you seem to acknowledge that there are people on both sides unreasonably using procedural quirks to impose their view on the majority.
'H' seems to me very balanced in that regards. You seem to think it's skewed too far towards the non-systemd people. How would you tweak it to make it more balanced?
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2019/11/msg00163.html
> So you seem to acknowledge that there are people on both sides unreasonably using procedural quirks to impose their view on the majority.
No, I just didn't want to derail the discussion in that direction; my original post was, in isolation, a statement of a problem with proposal H that made it unacceptable to me. That statement is not invalidated with "but the other side ..." arguments.
But since the topic has come up: There are definitely people who favor systemd and say things like "could we just kill sysvinit already", but words aside, I don't see substantial actions that gratuitously hurt sysvinit, rather than just side effects of using things that sysvinit doesn't support. Instead, I see many people just getting their work done by making other software better, and thus as a side effect causing alternatives to fall further behind.
Nobody set out to say "let's make GNOME work exclusively on systemd". They built atop features that systemd had and sysvinit didn't.
When you're trying to stay in permanent maintenance mode, someone doing active development looks like a threat. And when you have a much smaller and community, sometimes most of the people you have left are the extremists.
An interesting alternative to systemd doesn't look like sysvinit, it looks like a better and different solution to people's problems. The proposal that won leaves room for that to happen someday, while not slowing down active development. There'd be some very different conversations going on if, for instance, people were proposing runit as an alternative rather than raw sysvinit, or proposing an inittab.d directory and some helper programs that make inittab.d support inetd-style daemons, or otherwise asking people to include four lines of code to support an alternative rather than hundreds of lines.
> I'm involved in "actively developing" software, and often come across interfaces that I'd like to just throw away and start over; but instead, we have to make a plan to deprecate the old interface over the course of line 10 years.
Nobody's talking about throwing away interfaces and breaking compatibility. On the contrary, systemd still supports init scripts. What we're talking about is not continuing to use the old interface forever because people want to run software that will never support the new interface.
To use an analogy to SONAMEs: a new version of a library can introduce new interfaces without breaking the old ones, that new version will have the same SONAME, and code using the old interfaces will run on the new library, but code using that library's new interfaces won't run on the old library. And that's perfectly acceptable; that allows both sides of an interface to evolve together.
> That's because systems software is all about compatibility. If you wanted to be able to throw everything away every 6 months you should be writing Javascript.
1) See above.
2) There's no need for gratuitous insults or contempt culture here. Discussions on this topic already descend into flamewars very easily, let's not push them in that direction.
3) Javascript is still an environment where people have to care deeply about compatibility, both in the provision of interfaces (making sure old Javascript still runs) and in the use of them (making sure multiple browsers work).
4) I work entirely on systems software, and one of the things that happens regularly is introducing and using new interfaces, while carefully preserving compatibility with old interfaces.
> Option 'B' basically gives all the power to the pro-systemd crowd, because there's no real mechanism to force a stubborn maintainer to even review a patch tweaking things to work without systemd, much less accept it.
First of all, there are already such mechanisms, including the technical committee if it comes to that. But I personally don't think it needs to come to that.
If you're approaching this from a mindset of "force a stubborn maintainer", perhaps rethink your mindset. The whole point of option B is that we're not going to force maintainers to work on things they don't have any interest in. So, perhaps show that you can provide compatibility in a minimally invasive way. Perhaps convince a maintainer that you'd be happy to co-maintain the package to handle those bits. And perhaps don't cultivate the kind of personality that makes people want to ignore an entire email thread when they see your name (https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/thread_patterns/), so that people actually want to work with you.
Architectures have a similar tension. Debian supports many different target architectures, and that sometimes requires patching software to help it run on other architectures. People who care about the architecture help write those patches, people who maintain packages include those patches, and Debian occasionally has to decide which architectures are viable for release. There are occasional packages that only run on certain architectures. But for the most part, packages tend to run on every architecture, and architectures don't generate flamewars nearly as often.
But if an architecture came along that, say, didn't support something fundamental like mmap (such targets do exist), and the maintainers of that architecture wanted every package in Debian to do the work to support systems without mmap, that doesn't seem especially likely. In terms of invasiveness, I think that seems more analogous to the work required to support sysvinit.
> In any case, look at the votes.
I did. Per https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initsystems/ , "Support for multiple init systems is Required" resoundingly lost (below even "Further Discussion"), "Support for multiple init systems is Important" lost to everything else, and all the options submitted by anti-systemd folks lost to all the systemd options. The option that won is the one that allows for something better to come along in the future, which I think is exactly the right balance.
> clearly important to the community as a whole.
The vote demonstrates what is important to the community as a whole. It's a vote for "no, we won't slow down or stand still, but other alternatives are welcome to keep up".
> It seems to me then that guidelines need to be put in place to prevent extremists on either side from imposing their will on the whole community.
Such guidelines were put in place. Nobody on either side is in a position to impose their will on the whole community. The problem is that one side did want the ability to impose their will on the whole community.
> That procedure is in a section which specifically says it's about:
> > For example, creating system users or temporary directories. Current Debian approaches are often based on debhelper scripts.
> That looks to me like it's not about a dependency on random shiny new features; it's about replacing some core Debian functionality with systemd functionality, in a way which affects all users of the system.
Remember that the proposal you're quoting was written by sysvinit folks. It only mentions a couple of minor features of systemd that the sysvinit folks are pretty sure they can implement.
I wrote a mail last month with a long list of systemd features people may want to use, along with many of the same points from this discussion: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/10/msg00346.html . Please see that whole mail.
Please also see the note in that mail: I'm not trying to say "we should wholeheartedly adopt every one of these technologies"; [...] The issue is that we don't even have the option of considering most of these technologies in the current environment. Even if Policy changed tomorrow to have a full "unless you're using capabilities that alternate init systems don't have" clause, people would still be afraid of using those capabilities or merging patches that do so, lest their work become the subject of a giant flamewar. We should get to a state where people building something interesting using these capabilities and technologies can expect useful feedback, and potentially excitement and collaboration, rather than flames.
I think we need to move past the framing of "people don't want to write init scripts"; this is also about being unable to use a decade of additional capabilities that go far beyond sysvinit.
The net result of the decision years ago was, effectively, "we can use systemd as 'a better sysvinit', but we can't use any capabilities that go substantially beyond sysvinit".
The net result of the decision today is that people can finally start considering the use of capabilities that systemd has, without worrying about the next flamewar.
> doesn't it make sense that such a change should be taken carefully?
Are you under the impression that such a change won't be taken carefully? Such a change just won't be vetoed on the basis of "but sysvinit doesn't have that feature". That doesn't mean that every single feature will be adopted without due consideration.
Debian is typically very careful about compatibility and stability, and holds those as primary virtues, and I have confidence in Debian's continued ability to do so.
> 'H' seems to me very balanced in that regards. You seem to think it's skewed too far towards the non-systemd people. How would you tweak it to make it more balanced?
I have no interest in relitigating this vote. The option that won is the one I consider the correct balance. Rather than handing one group power over the other, it simply says that everyone is free to work on what they want to work on, and to convince others to join them, without giving any special treatment or veto power to sysvinit.
Considering the small minority of Linux installations on desktops and laptops (compared to servers and other network infrastructure), and the fact that only some of those will be using Gnome, I think this has been overemphasised. It's unfortunate that a minority has dictated policy for everyone else.
Having said that, I think Debian has made a rational decision. It would be unreasonable to expect package maintainers to provide multiple sets of init scripts due to the extra work. (FWIW I've used Debian for ~20 years and still use sysvinit).
Good programming practice is to make it easy to change components like that, and doing it also helps testing. In theory it should just be a matter of replacing a few components to get gnome running without systemd, depending on how hard coupled those are.
Thus has been showcased that it is possible and there's no reason why this shouldn't be a separate library in first place according to all those great UNIX and programming philosophical motto out there.