>Then I have no idea about default installation (you can probably look at
>package dependencies to figure it out). But from Debian's current POV, it is
>probably considered an improvement to add systemd components and more
>recent versios of ______ that use them, even if PID1 is still sysvinit. After
>all this is what Ubun7u and Trisquel are doing.





Probably. To be clear, I don’t know if that is the case or if they simply did something else, like rename a package. Either way, I call it “crap.” You can purge it with no error, but aptitude wants to reinstall it the next time the resolver is run. There is no reason to change to this that I can think of. Without looking at the code, I’d guess that it is just a bad dependency chain introduced in the last update - otherwise I couldn’t guess as to what they were thinking.

To me at least, this incident is just another example of the QA pitfalls of the traditional “Linux distribution” process. They talk about stability and maintainability, but the second that that becomes fashionably inconvenient, they introduce new things into mix even after “the cake has been baked.”

Every spec is only kept for as long as it is convenient for the packager to do so, the user’s actual real world needs play second fiddle.