Upon reflection, I don't think this is a systemd problem -- which is to say, many other distros (not even ones sponsored by Red Hat -- Arch, SuSE, Mageia, NixOS, etc.) have managed to switch to systemd as a default without this kind of a fuss. It's only Debian where this kind of a shitstorm has kicked off -- even Gentoo, which has been a rather vocal systemd holdout, offers systemd and doesn't seem to have this kind of political infighting about it. Now, yes, Debian and its downstreams have a large part of the Linux userbase, so there's apt to be more attention paid to it. But I'm starting to think this is a Debian problem, not a systemd problem.
And the reason I think that is because this isn't a question of whether or not people do or don't use systemd. It's a question of who is going to do the work to ensure that people who choose not to use systemd can continue to use popular packages like GNOME, etc. And to this end, Ian Jackson is leading a vocal group that is willing to use ANY means at hand -- the Technical Committee, General Resolutions, whatever -- in order to cudgel Debian package maintainers and upstream software into doing the work that they think needs to be done in order to support their desire not to use systemd. The problem in a volunteer project like Debian, forcing volunteers to do work they don't want to doesn't lead to the volunteers doing the work you insist they should do, it leads to volunteers leaving. And the upstreams are not going to respond to Jackson's quite frankly childish attempts to bully them into continuing to support sysvinit from now until the end of time. And until Jackson and his backers step into the breach to actually write freaking code to do what they want to instead of politicking to try and force others to write they code they want, it's going to continue to drag the Debian project into this kind of a mess.
> even Gentoo, which has been a rather vocal systemd holdout, offers systemd and doesn't seem to have this kind of political infighting about it.
One of Gentoo's fundamental goals is to provide the users with as much choice as possible.
So far, they managed to get Systemd as an alternative to OpenRC. The major part of their issue with Systemd earlier was udev's dependency on Systemd, which made a lot of typical things messier. Once that got sorted, things are moving forward. Gentoo just wants to be a 'meta-distribution' so you can make your own customized system, and Systemd dependencies being added everywhere were detrimental to that effort.
The switch to systemd is made by authority, not competence.
The roadmap and the properties of systemd are totally awesome ... on the paper.
The problem in reality is that authority does not makes good engineering. Marketing neither. Systemd can be picked up for way too many reasons but imposing a poorly designed solution () by authority is hitting a nerve.
This move is looking like good old microsoft force feeding wrong technical solutions (thus costing expensive resources) to ALL free unices and a lot of projects for a wtf motivation that is clearly not the optimum technically.
You know how hard it is to make a software that works? Every resource spoiled on a stupid idea at the OS level is like a tax imposed on every single software that requires to be integrated in the system ... thus ALL projects.
Since some of them are impacted they voice their concern. And since debian is one of the most prominent linux that is clearly free software, that is where people voices their bug reports and sometimes also their concerns.
Btw look at the bugs in this mailing list, some are just non acceptable (why would you need dbus to login? What a sysadmin can thus do when dbus fails? For Zeus' sakes: WTF! 0_o)
And the reason I think that is because this isn't a question of whether or not people do or don't use systemd. It's a question of who is going to do the work to ensure that people who choose not to use systemd can continue to use popular packages like GNOME, etc. And to this end, Ian Jackson is leading a vocal group that is willing to use ANY means at hand -- the Technical Committee, General Resolutions, whatever -- in order to cudgel Debian package maintainers and upstream software into doing the work that they think needs to be done in order to support their desire not to use systemd. The problem in a volunteer project like Debian, forcing volunteers to do work they don't want to doesn't lead to the volunteers doing the work you insist they should do, it leads to volunteers leaving. And the upstreams are not going to respond to Jackson's quite frankly childish attempts to bully them into continuing to support sysvinit from now until the end of time. And until Jackson and his backers step into the breach to actually write freaking code to do what they want to instead of politicking to try and force others to write they code they want, it's going to continue to drag the Debian project into this kind of a mess.