I brought this up earlier in the discussion, but it appeared right in the middle of the big argument about what to vote on, and so seems to have gotten overlooked. I think this pair of requirements, both grounded in what it's going to take to do upgrades from wheezy in a clean fashion, might be a useful alternative to the "L" and "T" positions that are currently being discussed:
For the release of jessie only, 1. No package may, merely by being installed or upgraded, change the currently-active init system or the init system that will bring up the machine on the next reboot. In other words, installations upgraded from wheezy will continue to boot with sysvinit until the local sysadmin takes an additional deliberate step to switch to something else. [I see this as a vital requirement simply because the sysadmin of any given installation should have a chance to check over local software, scripts, etc. to make sure they can handle a changeover. It also provides a stabilization point after all packages have been upgraded but before the init system has been changed, which may simplify how the changeover process works.] 2. Packages may depend on a particular init system in the usual fashion, but because of (1), must be prepared to cope at runtime if that init system is not active. Failure to cope is a bug. The severity of that bug, and the appropriate meaning of "cope" for each package, are left to the discretion of individual package maintainers and/or the release team. [In conjunction with (1), this prevents the formation of "archive islands" where you can't *install* things just because you don't have the maintainer's preferred init system active - perhaps for good reason. But it avoids the equally troublesome situation where software with a hard dependency can't express that dependency honestly; it just has to have some sort of runtime check as well - and that, again, is essential for upgrades to go smoothly.] [Examples of "failure to cope is a bug": assuming no unit-file-to-sysvinit-script shim materializes, it would be an RC bug if openssh-server dropped its sysvinit script prior to jessie. Similarly for other important network servers. That journal GUI Josselin mentioned *ought* to be able to display journal-format logs if pointed to them by name, even if journald itself is not running, so it has a bug, but if the maintainer wants to call it a wishlist bug that's fine. It does not make sense to try to run cgmanager and systemd simultaneously, so cgmanager should detect on startup that some other (not necessarily systemd) program has control of cgroups, and if so, bail out cleanly; assuming it does so, it does not have a bug.] zw -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
