The older Arch developers may remember vaguely how Arch has introduced
[1] and migrated to systemd [2] becoming the new and only supported init
system. Back in these days we had some developers in our team being part
of upstream systemd developers. Not much discussion happened about
supporting any alternative init system. Other alternative init systems
have become niche in Arch and faded out over time.
The main reason for switching to systemd was because most upstream projects started to implemented systemd as main starting system of the daemons.
KISS means supply it as the author wanted to ship the software.
Maybe you forgot how many bug reports we had due to not starting the services in correct order or wrong used options.
Nowadays systemd has become much more than a plain init system
and plans to grow further. This may leadd to problems from a user and
system administrator perspective once you are hit by some bug. Systemd
as a whole thing doesn't care about the Unix philosophy to do only one
thing but well.
Sure it evolved as it should. As example systemd with iwd is much faster than wpa_supplicant solutions.
The harmony of kernel/udev/dbus/systemd made a lot of things working in better speed for example.
Many and often highly skilled users left and leave Arch therefor or
choose some different distribution or an Arch fork because there's no
init choice in Arch Linux.
Well I don't see devs leaving cause of systemd usage.
I suggest to fix this lack of init choice/alternative. I'd like to
implement it into the official Arch Linux repos allowing to choose
some different init replacement. We can either just add a 2nd init
system in the most simple way or allow real init-freedom[3] offering
full choice and leave it up to be further filled by the community.
Freedom is nice, but this is putting a high risk of breaking and introducing bugs,
due to the used init system, which is not supported by upstream.
Arch Linux could take advantage of this bringing back some lost parts
of the community. With more choice and better portability Arch could
become a better base for porting to new architectures. And freedom and
alternatives is always good in the open source world. The clear
drawback would become some added complexity allowing to choose either
systemd or its replacement parts and to make all of them to work with
existing packages especially daemon services.
Which architectures are you reffering to?
I'm willing to do most of the packaging implementations when a majority
of the team think it's good idea and worth the effort. It's a rather
huge effort and imho not a task for some personal custom repo as it may
affect devtools, infrastructure and maybe more of our core distro.
This is a huge task which affects most daemon packages and DEs.
If you want to check how some init choice can be implemented I suggest
to start looking at Parabola[4], Hyperbola[5] and [6] Artix Linux forks
first. These are all rather small projects but we being the mother and
true Arch community should have the resources to implement it in a
proper way without any major drawbacks.
I don't think this can be achieved and is worth the hassle it will bring.