The GR outcome is: no GR necessary

This is good news.

Because it says: Debian will remain Debian, as it was the last 20 years.

For 20 years, we have tried hard to build the “universal operating system”, and give users a choice. We’ve often had alternative software in the archive. Debian has come up with various tool to manage alternatives over time, and for example allows you to switch the system-wide Java.

You can still run Debian with sysvinit. There are plenty of Debian Developers which will fight for this to be possible in the future.

The outcome of this resolution says:

Using a GR to force others is the wrong approach of getting compatibility.

We’ve offered choice before, and we trust our fellow developers to continue to work towards choice.

Write patches, not useless GRs. We’re coders, not bureocrats.

We believe we can do this, without making it a formal MUST requirement. Or even a SHOULD requirement. Just do it.

The sysvinit proponents may perceive this decision as having “lost”. But they just don’t realize they won, too. Because the GR may easily have backfired on them. The GR was not “every package must support sysvinit”. It was also “every sysvinit package must support systemd”. Here is an example: eudev, a non-systemd fork of udev. It is not yet in Debian, but I’m fairly confident that someone will make a package of it after the release, for the next Debian. Given the text of the GR, this package might have been inappropriate for Debian, unless it also supports systemd. But systemd has it’s own udev - there is no reason to force eudev to work with systemd, is there?

Debian is about choice. This includes the choice to support different init systems as appropriate. Not accepting a proper patch that adds support for a different init would be perceived as a major bug, I’m assured.

A GR doesn’t ensure choice. It only is a hammer to annoy others. But it doesn’t write the necessary code to actually ensure compatibility.

If GNOME at some point decides that systemd as pid 1 is a must, the GR only would have left us three options: A) fork the previous version, B) remove GNOME altogether, C) remove all other init systems (so that GNOME is compliant). Does this add choice? No.

Now, we can preserve choice: if GNOME decides to go systemd-pid1-only, we can both include a forked GNOME, and the new GNOME (depending on systemd, which is allowed without the GR). Or any other solution that someone codes and packages…

Don’t fear that systemd will magically become a must. Trust that the Debian Developers will continue what they have been doing the last 20 years. Trust that there are enough Debian Developers that don’t run systemd. Because they do exist, and they’ll file bugs where appropriate. Bugs and patches, that are the appropriate tools, not GRs (or trolling).