[arch-dev-public] The future of sysvinit in Arch: Call for Help

[Eric Bélanger]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 5:30 PM, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Eric Bélanger <snowmaniscool at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm a bit confused by this post.
>
> I guess I should clarify my aim: As there are vocal proponents of
> sysvinit who feel strongly about staying with that, I'd rather help
> them get started in the right direction rather than cause lots of
> unnecessary confusion and fragmentation (as I alluded to at the end of
> my email I have seen some misguided attempts at doing this which I
> think would be detrimental to everyone). Where this work happens (if
> it happens), is not really anything I gave much thought. If it is the
> consensus that we should quickly drop initscripts and sysvinit from
> our repos and ask people to work on it elsewhere that's completely
> fine with me.
>
>> My understanding was that we were
>> switching to systemd as the default init system because maintaining
>> two init systems was too much work and problems.
>
> My take is that it would be too much trouble to make all packages
> (polkit, networkmanager, gnome, ...) support both running under
> initscripts and systemd. Moreover, it is not really possible to
> improve initscripts to the point where it is competitive to systemd.
> So making systemd the default makes sense.
>
> However, maintaining the initscripts package as it currently is is not
> really a big problem from a technical point of view. Nor is
> maintaining non-systemd versions of the relevant packages in a
> separate repo.

I've moved to systemd now but if the initscripts users are fine with
that, then it's fine with me.

>
>> -remove initscripts from the repos
>> -no more developement in git and on arch-project ML
>
> I don't see the benefit of doing that quickly, but if that's what you
> guys want, it is fine with me. I would be in favor of initscripts
> dying a natural death.
>

If there are people interested in maintaining it, then I have no
objection that it stays in the repos.

>> -we can start removing rc.d scripts from packages as we update them
>
> That would be fine (and someone could gather them from svn and put
> them in a package in some third-party repo (as I suggested)).

Or put it in [extra] alongside the initscripts package.

>
>> By letting initscripts become a user project,
>> we will be able to use our resource on other aspects of the distro.
>
> I'm not suggesting that anyone but me should put any efforts at all
> towards supporting non-systemd systems. My point was  exactly to get a
> user-driven project started (if anyone steps up).

That's a good idea.  It'll help the interested users to organize themselves.

>
>> Also maintaining initscripts in repo also means maintaining the rc.d
>> scripts.
>
> I don't think that follows. In the same way that systemd has been in
> community/extra/core for a long time without service files around, the
> same could be the case for initscripts.
>
>> As most of us dev/TU are using (or will use) systemd, these
>> will be harder to maintain and fix.
>
> I agree, rc scripts should be dropped as soon as they become a burden
> (which could be decided on a package-by-package basis).
>
>> I don't know what you think about this but that's how I see things.
>
> Sorry if I created any confusion. Hope it is clear now.
>
> -t