Steve Litt - 06.07.19, 07:24:
> > It is not
> > difficult to think of the day when Debian will remove completely
> > sysvinit script in all packages.
>
> Pre-Cisely!

I would not bet on that.

There is the debian-init-diversity group where Debian and Devuan people
work together. Back then I helped to bring that forward and there is
still a lot of activity. Developers in that group did updates for
sysvinit, insserv, startpar, openrc, runit and others for Debian which
then could be and have been used in Devuan. At the same time there is a
new upstream maintainer for sysvinit, insserv and startpar so these are
all actively developed. These developers closed a ton of sysvinit
related bug reports in Debian. It's amazing. In fact the upstream
developer even dug through Debian bug tracker to find bugs to fix. Just
look at this:

https://bugs.debian.org/sysvinit-core

I believe sysvinit has never ever been in a better state in Debian than
it is now. Granted insserv still has more – but it already received a
lot of bug fixes as well:

https://bugs.debian.org/insserv

Look at this in comparison:

https://bugs.debian.org/systemd

Especially the ton of *forwarded* bugs! That are those for upstream to
handle.

While Debian project for now will keep the libsystemd0 dependency on a
lot of packages that not absolutely need it and regarding init diversity
there is a place for Devuan to go further, there are Debian developers
who strongly prefer to use sysvinit and who prefer to avoid Systemd.

Actually I have been pleasantly surprised. I just migrated also the mail
server and Quassel IRC to my new 64-Bit Devuan server from my old 32-Bit
Debian with sysvinit server, in addition to migrating the web server and
MariaDB before. And actually everything had init scripts. Postfix,
Dovecot, rspamd, Quassel core, Apache, PHP FPM, sshguard, MariaDB, you
name… everything worked out of the box. So far the only things that does
not work on Debian without Systemd out of the box are desktop related
things:

- Pulseaudio does not start, at least with Plasma

- Evolution background services do not start, at least with Plasma

That kind of inspired the user-services project I did not work on after
that again. I more and more believe it would be good to package that
stuff in a way that it would work out of the box for users. Or… well to
do some post package processing to make it work.

Of course it is likely at some time some may bring up that topic and
there would be a discussion, but… assuming from the past, that
discussion would take a time to come to an conclusion. So I believe the
risk that all Debian developers would *suddenly* drop init scripts from
packages is quite low. There would be at least a considerable
forewarning time.

That said, I agree it would be good to find a way to inject runit
symlinks into packages, cause I believe it to be unlikely that many
Debian package maintainers would include runit support. However that
said, I would.

So: If you like to provide runit support for fio Debian package, please
go ahead. As long as the runit support is implemented in a way that the
existing start support for sysvinit – which I implemented back then –
and systemd still works as well, and you tested the runit support, I
gladly accept a merge request. I'd even make some effort to put it into
the package itself, in case you provide something to me, in case you are
not familiar with forking a git repo and providing a merge request.

But also it would be good to have something like this to fix up
Pulseaudio and Evolution for Devuan users.

So I believe it is good to let go of any drama and fear and just get on
with actually doing something to improve runit / s6 support.

Thanks,
--
Martin