On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 10:13:13AM +0000, Noel Torres wrote:
> My Excel macros are a bit slow today (Yes, I said Excel, I use that
> at work) so I started wondering...
>
> What do we (the DNG people) want for ascii ?
>
> My list starts as this:
> * full init freedom, that is, all init methods being equally
> supported (sysv, upstart, systemd) and nothing depending on any of
> them.

There's a log-standing answer to the systemd issue -- let Debian take
care of it; anyone who wants it can use Debian. We don't have the
manpower.

But there's more to it tha that; if devuan catches on we may end up
with the manpower.

The trouble with systemd is that is is not an init system. It
contains an init system. It is a user-mode OS that takes over many of
the faclities that other packages depend on and requires them to go
through it instead of the kernel. Many packages have to be changed to
accomodate this (and our task here has always be to unchange them).

So to accomodate systemd as an alleged init system, we would have to
split many pakages into two -- one that uses systemd, and another that
does not, depending on which so-called init system was used. Now
this alone might be able to be accomplished by a suitable
complicated ste of package dependencies and exclusions. But to enable
the init system to be specified at boot time as an init= parameter, we
must allow the init choice to me made at run time.

Now suitable elaboration of a package manager like zero--install might
be able to handle it, but it starts to be clear that systemd is another
operating system on top of the Linux kernel, and we might as well
recognise it and let people dual-boot, just as we currently do with
those wanting to install both Devuan and Gentoo.

-- hendrik