As many of you know, there is a General Resolution on Debian's init system policy that is currently under consideration. A General Resolution is a proposal made by Debian Developers for determining governance issues based upon the outcome of voting by all eligible voters. Under Debian's governance model, only Debian Developers are permitted to vote.
This GR will determine to what extent Debian will be committed to using only the systemd project's init system and whether the option of using another init system will be either mandated or encouraged. The specifics of the GR are available on this site and therein the four choices available to be voted upon are described in detail.
The above poll is an unofficial survey of how the members of this forum might vote if they were permitted to. It only briefly describes each of the four choices available so if you are unfamiliar with the issue, please visit the aforementioned official webpage to get a more detailed description of the choices.
The current situation is that systemd is the default init system chosen for the next Debian release (Jessie) and that support for other init systems -- including continued support for the current default Sysvinit -- is encouraged, but not mandated. None of the choices available for this General Resolution attempt to change the chosen default init system for Jessie; and at the time of this posting, no packages are expected to be impacted by the outcome of this GR. It is only to what extent alternatives are to be supported going forward that is at issue.
An informal characterization of the four choices, in my own words, would be:
- This choice would provide a mandate to Debian package maintainers to provide support for an alternative to systemd. Such a mandate might provide some leverage toward upstreams to accommodate alternative inits with their software, or it might result in packages being unable to enter Debian. It might also make Debian package maintainers feeling deprived of their rights to decide what is best.
- This choice is pretty much the way policy for Jessie is right now, though this choice might provide some degree of emphasis that package maintainers should, but are not required to, accommodate alternative init systems.
- This choice suggests that a package can indeed depend upon a specific init system and the decision is up to the individual package maintainers -- maintainers would not be compelled to consider accommodating alternatives.
- This choice says that this General Resolution is unnecessary.
And, of course, you can discuss the vote here.