[arch-general] When will Arch switch to Upstart

[Tom Gundersen]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 1:13 PM, Karol Babioch <karol at babioch.de> wrote:
> Am 20.01.2011 14:18, schrieb Tom Gundersen:>
>> Anything in particular you have in mind? We are working towards
>> complete backwards compatibility with initscripts, and we are more or
>> less there (modulo unknown bugs).
>
> First of all I was talking about systemd as the default init system
> within Arch.

I see. I misunderstood.

>> Any suggestions about what might make the installation easier? At the
>> moment you have to install some packages from AUR and add a line to
>> your GRUB file.
>
> I appreciate your work (and anyone who has helped you out a bit), but to
> be honest its not the way I would think of an ideal solution :(. Right
> now you have to install a few packages from AUR and run it in parallel
> with sysvinit. I don't even know if there is a way to remove sysvinit,
> but I would guess this wouldn't be easy.

At the moment removing sysvinit is not a goal. We are happy to see
them peacefully co-exist. I expect this will continue being our goal
as long as sysvinit is the default on Arch.

> Furthermore units are provided by a single package. I don't think thats
> a good way, as I get a whole bunch of units I actually don't need.

This is a temporary solution until packages ship unit files upstream.
I agree it is not ideal, but it is a simple solution for the time
being (without much of a drawback, the unused unit files are not even
parsed).

> All in all, its relatively easy to install systemd, because of the work
> you and others have done, but it doesn't follow the KISS principle at all.

I agree that the temporary packaging solutions are not ideal, but it's
the best we can do in the short run. However, none of these problems
are fundamental, and if/when systemd is in widespread use, these
problems will disappear.

> I guess, to make it really affordable it must be declared as official,
> so the packages itself contain the units, replacing the sysvinit.

At the moment the intention is just to allow people to test systemd,
so this would be quite premature.

Thanks for your comments.

Cheers,

Tom