Switch to systemd?

[Jacek Konieczny]

On the Polish mailing list there is discussion about systemd support.
SysVinit is evil and needs to be replaced – its hard to argue about
that. Though, I have already done some work to replace SysVinit with
Upstart.

The question is, should we now start maintaining the third init
subsystem? Or should we drop anything done for Upstart? Or even drop
legacy SysVinit support?

I made most of the Upstart support, but it seems no one but me and Glen
cares about it. I am ready to give it up in favour of systemd, uniformly
handled over whole system and maintained by more than two people.

Anybody relies on Upstart or can we assume it was a dead end road and we
can give it up? Do we need any transition facilities (I will take care
of my systems myself)? 

What about current SysVinit scripts. Should we keep them and maintain
them or start switching everything (including whole rc-scripts) to
systemd? This can break backward compatibility a lot, but we could gain
much more consistent (which also means: more reliable and faster) system
in the end.

Anyway, LSB scripts in /etc/init.d should still be supported in some way
and probably wrapper scripts for services maintained by systemd should
be placed there too – some things still rely on that and this will allow
us port old packages (not bound by complicated dependencies with
anything else) one by one.

Greets,
        Jacek