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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. PS: Please leave out all emotions about hating or loving systemd. I'm trying to do so as well. -Andy [1]https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.org/message/3JTBCAIKC7IELB6LMSEIS66E773OSKL5/ [2]https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.org/message/EK553KWVOY6UYBDSKAP5XQIPGHNLJXMH/ [3]https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom [4]https://wiki.parabola.nu/Repositories#nonsystemd [5]https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:systemd_denial [6]https://wiki.artixlinux.org/Main/Installation [6]
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