Comment by the_why_of_y | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_why_of_y | Hacker News Reader

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Debian has not in fact been systemd only; the GR that is being discussed in this thread replaces a decision by the Technical Committee from 2014:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/08/msg00...

  For the record, the TC expects maintainers to continue to support
  the multiple available init systems in Debian.  That includes
  merging reasonable contributions, and not reverting existing
  support without a compelling reason.

However, in practice Debian users tend not to replace systemd's PID1 with the sysvinit-core package, as it is installed on a negligible fraction of Debian systems.

https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=systemd%2C+s...

I'm not sure you can rely on popcon to make decisions like that.. anyone who doesn't explicitly opt in, and anyone who installs on a system with limited internet access (i.e. probably most enterprise users) won't be counted.

> I'm not sure you can rely on popcon to make decisions like that

I'd go further and say you definitely can't rely on popcon, for two main reasons:

1 - Not many sysadmins are happy to install a program that "phones home" at regular intervals about system usage.

2 - Popcon records file access times, so a server that runs for long periods between restarts or reboots shows init files are accessed infrequently. This skews the result towards desktop and laptop installations (which are most likely to use the default init).

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