Hi all,

Pleased to see so many experienced *nix hands taking issue
with Debian plans for introducing systemd, and seeking
alternatives.

It will certainly take some months to be able to establish
the infrastructure teams and processes to deliver a new
distribution derived from Debian. In the interim I think it
would be nice to offer some path forward to jessie or sid
users wanting to escape the web of systemd dependencies.

If we can provide equivalent packages *without* the systemd
dependency through a separate repository, users wanting to
avoid systemd could simply add the repo to their
/etc/apt/sources.list.

Most of the end-user frameworks and applications that pull
in systemd, do not depend on systemd directly, but depend on
some other package that depends on systemd.

So one strategy is to pin those key packages to versions
that don't depend on systemd. For example, pinning dbus
1.5.8-1, avoids systemd dependencies via dbus.[1,2] That
approach is worth researching and publicizing.

Another is to distribute modified package versions.

A member of the debian-user mailing list analyzed the
package dependencies on systemd components on his system and
generated some graphs.[3] The graphs are not authoritative as
he only analyzed the packages installed on his system;
nevertheless they quite informative.

There are less than a dozen packages at the bottom, whose
systemd dependencies get propagated through the rest of the
packaging hierarchy.

He then rebuilt these second-tier packages for himself
*without* the dependencies on systemd, and found no
particular issues on his system. He didn't patch the original
sources, only made changes under debian/.

While he wasn't interested in pursuing the project further
than his own needs, he kindly passed me his patches to the
package sources. Please contact me if you are interested
on working on these packages, which include:

dbus
fcgiwrap
gvfs
php5
policykit
pulseaudio
udisks2

I've started with dbus.[4] If someone can build
amd64 and i386 versions of this package, that is
something we can distribute.

Thanks for your attention. Kind regards,

Joel

1. http://snapshot.debian.org/package/dbus/1.5.8-1/
2. http://refracta.freeforums.org/going-with-the-systemd-flow-or-not-t422-10.html#p3990
3. http://imgur.com/a/Wi1zb
4. https://github.com/bolangi/dbus-debian-dfree

--
Joel Roth