GR 2019 002

Just sent in my vote. After carefully considering what I consider to be important, and reading all the options, I ended up with 84312756.

There are two options that rule out any compromise position; choice 1, "Focus on systemd", essentially says that anything not systemd is unimportant and we should just drop it. At the same time, choice 6, "support for multiple init systems is required", essentially says that you have to keep supporting other systems no matter what the rest of the world is doing lalala I'm not listening mom he's stealing my candy again.

Debian has always been a very diverse community; as a result, historically, we've provided a wide range of valid choices to our users. The result of that is that some of our derivatives have chosen Debian to base their very non-standard distribution on. It is therefore, to me, no surprise that Devuan, the very strongly no-systemd distribution, was based on Debian and not Fedora or openSUSE.

Personally I consider this variety in our users to be a good thing, and something to treasure; so any option that essentially throws that away, like choice 1, is not something I could live with. At the same time, the world has evolved, and most of our users do use systemd these days, which does provide a number of features over and above the older sysvinit system. Ignoring that fact, like option 6 does, is unreasonable in today's world.

So neither of those two options are acceptable to me.

That just leaves the other available options. All of those accept the fact that systemd has become the primary option, but differ in the amount of priority given to alternate options. The one outlier is option 5; it tries to give general guidance on portability issues, rather than commenting on the systemd situation specifically. While I can understand that desire, I don't agree with it, so it definitely doesn't get first position for me. At the same time, I don't think it's a terrible option, in that it still provides an opinion that I agree with. All in all, it barely made the cutoff above further discussion -- but really only barely so.

How did you vote?

Posted