I won’t comment once again systemd, I think my mind set on the topic and future will tell if I was right or wrong. Still, dislike for the humongous scope self-assigned by systemd does not equate to consider that sysv-rc cannot be improved, it does not mean being stuck with sysv-rc for life.

Good thing is OpenRC is still being developed (latest release: 7 days ago) and, being portable over BSDs, is very unlikely to follow systemd path. Switching Debian 8.8 from sysv-rc over openrc (assuming you already got rid of systemd) is just a matter of installing it:

apt-get install openrc for file in /etc/rc0.d/K*; do s=`basename $(readlink "$file")` ; /etc/init.d/$s stop; done

Then after reboot, removing sysv-rc:

apt-get --purge remove sysv-rc rm -rf /etc/rc*.d /etc/rc.local

You might want then to edit /etc/rc.conf (for instance for LXC containers rc_sys=”lxc” option), check status with rc-status, check services according to runlevels in /etc/runlevels.

Update: also works with Debian 9.0 just released. But do not bother removing /etc/rc*.d, they now belong to package init-system-helpers, a package that “contains helper tools that are necessary for switching between the various init systems that Debian contains (e. g. sysvinit or systemd)”, essential on which other packages depends on (like cron). I actually asked for init-system-helpers not to force people to have in /etc directories that makes sense only for systemd or sysv-rc but, so far, got no real reply, but a WONTFIX closure – apparently the fact that update-rc.d would require /etc/rc*.d is the main issue, while update-rc.d handles perfectly the fact that /etc/runlevels may or may not exists.

For more details about OpenRC, I suggest to read Debian’s Debate initsystem openrc listing pros and cons.