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

[Tom Gundersen]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Eric Bélanger <snowmaniscool at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm a bit confused by this post.

I guess I should clarify my aim: As there are vocal proponents of
sysvinit who feel strongly about staying with that, I'd rather help
them get started in the right direction rather than cause lots of
unnecessary confusion and fragmentation (as I alluded to at the end of
my email I have seen some misguided attempts at doing this which I
think would be detrimental to everyone). Where this work happens (if
it happens), is not really anything I gave much thought. If it is the
consensus that we should quickly drop initscripts and sysvinit from
our repos and ask people to work on it elsewhere that's completely
fine with me.

> 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.

My take is that it would be too much trouble to make all packages
(polkit, networkmanager, gnome, ...) support both running under
initscripts and systemd. Moreover, it is not really possible to
improve initscripts to the point where it is competitive to systemd.
So making systemd the default makes sense.

However, maintaining the initscripts package as it currently is is not
really a big problem from a technical point of view. Nor is
maintaining non-systemd versions of the relevant packages in a
separate repo.

> -remove initscripts from the repos
> -no more developement in git and on arch-project ML

I don't see the benefit of doing that quickly, but if that's what you
guys want, it is fine with me. I would be in favor of initscripts
dying a natural death.

> -we can start removing rc.d scripts from packages as we update them

That would be fine (and someone could gather them from svn and put
them in a package in some third-party repo (as I suggested)).

> By letting initscripts become a user project,
> we will be able to use our resource on other aspects of the distro.

I'm not suggesting that anyone but me should put any efforts at all
towards supporting non-systemd systems. My point was  exactly to get a
user-driven project started (if anyone steps up).

> Also maintaining initscripts in repo also means maintaining the rc.d
> scripts.

I don't think that follows. In the same way that systemd has been in
community/extra/core for a long time without service files around, the
same could be the case for initscripts.

> As most of us dev/TU are using (or will use) systemd, these
> will be harder to maintain and fix.

I agree, rc scripts should be dropped as soon as they become a burden
(which could be decided on a package-by-package basis).

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

Sorry if I created any confusion. Hope it is clear now.

-t