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

[Eric Bélanger]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> As the move to systemd is under way, and we will soon have packages in
> our repos that require your system to be booted with systemd, I
> thought this would be a good time to summarize the state of
> sysvinit/initscripts in Arch and their future.
>
> Abstract: I think the current state is relatively good (but I'm
> clearly very biased) and it should not be hard to maintain a
> non-systemd boot on Arch even in the long-run. However, someone has to
> do the work.
>
> NOTE: Please let's keep any replies on-topic. This is NOT about
> whether or not sysvinit or systemd is good or bad.
>

> Initscripts
> ======
>
> Initscripts are currently fully supported and actively developed. Work
> has been going on for a long time to make initscripts and systemd
> share the same configuration file format wherever that makes sense,
> and this work is mostly completed (at least on the initscripts side).
> Moreover, code is shared between systemd and initscripts wherever
> possible (there might still be more opportunities for this, but the
> work is mostly completed). Together, these two developments should
> make it relatively easy to maintain initscripts for Arch in the
> long-run, even with a small user/developer base.
>
> I intend to maintain initscripts in the official repos as long as this
> makes sense. However, for this to be viable, I think we would need at
> least one capable and active initscripts developer who is interested
> in helping out and who uses sysvinit/initscripts as their main init
> system. In the long-run it would make sense for such a person to take
> over maintainership of initscripts. Anyone interested, please join
> arch-projects and post reviews, suggestions and patches :-)
>

Hi,

I'm a bit confused by this post. 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. Therefore, I thought
that it was implied that once systemd is the default, we would stop
supporting initscripts.

I agree that we should keep supporting initscripts for a short
transition period (1 month?) after systemd is the default. If we do
things this way, we should decide on the length so we could mention it
in the "systemd is now default" announcement. After that transition
period, we should drop support for initscript which means:

-remove initscripts from the repos
-no more developement in git and on arch-project ML
-we can start removing rc.d scripts from packages as we update them

If there is user interest, they can clone the git repo and continue
developpement on github or on another one of these open source
website. And AUR can host the PKGBUILD for initscript and a collection
of the rc.d scripts.  By letting initscripts become a user project,
we will be able to use our resource on other aspects of the distro.

Also maintaining initscripts in repo also means maintaining the rc.d
scripts.  As most of us dev/TU are using (or will use) systemd, these
will be harder to maintain and fix.

I don't know what you think about this but that's how I see things.

Eric