Can I offer the view of a concerned end-user here? I have worries about the proposal to force me to change from a sysV init system about which I'm still learning things despite first starting with GNU/Linux perhaps twenty years ago, to a new-fangled systemd system that, to me, does not (yet) seem stable and which possesses significant gaps in functionality especially in regards to non-main stream configurations.
Over time one of the features that attracted me to Debian was the
conservative but robust attitude it had compared to some other
distributions - you won't necessarily get the latest bells and whistles
but you could get a well tested and relatively stable platform. For
that reason - and the fact that I'm not running bleeding edge hardware -
I would wish to choose not to adopt sure a core component {and from what
I've read of it today its developers do seem to want it to be *the* core
component on many linux systems} as systemd until either there was
absolutely no other choice or it was pretty much foolproof. At this
time I can't see either of these being the case.
For new system installs, yes I can see that it might be reasonable to
try as a default - generally a new system install is either going to be
someone trying a *nix OS for the first time or someone who is preparing
to change from another distribution. In those cases the user is not
going to have data and configuration already present or they will have
taken steps to save what they want to transplant from one setup to
another. If, for some reason, things don't work out they likely to have
an alternative direction to try. For upgrades, it is a different kettle
of worms, the user has tweaked things to their likings and will have
some, if not a lot, of data that they want to hang on to; they may be
willing to try some new features or changes if those enhances their user
experience but they won't necessarily want to throw the baby out with
the bathwater. A default upgrade path that has even just a small chance
of leaving them with an unbootable system and with, I suspect, no quick
and easy way to backout from does not seem the optimum choice!
A concerned Debian Wheezy(-backports) User
Stephen Lyons
P.S. I'm speaking also as someone who got clobbered by an Xorg server
upgrade earlier this week - still not entirely sure what went wrong but
glad I only upgraded one machine at a time because a blank Xserver
screen on a machine not accepting keyboard/mouse input is no use to
anyone. Sorta got it back into life but udev/dbus and networking no
longer start automatically on bootup, stopping gmd3 no longer kills the
X server it sometimes manages to spawn which stalls indefinitely
expecting data from the non-existent udev - and I wasted a whole day
getting back to THAT state.
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