1 [ apparently-accepted amendments from <874n3ubiho.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu>
2 not yet incorporated here ]
4 A Provide advice; software may so require (Russ)
5 =================================================
7 The following is technical advice offered to the project by the
8 Technical Committee under section 6.1.5 of the constitution. It does
9 not constitute an override of maintainer decisions past or future:
11 Packages should normally support the default Linux init system. There
12 are some exceptional cases where lack of support for the default init
13 system may be appropriate, such as alternative init system
14 implementations, special-use packages such as managers for non-default
15 init systems, and cooperating groups of packages intended for use with
16 non-default init systems. However, package maintainers should be
17 aware that a requirement for a non-default init system will mean the
18 package will be unusable for most Debian users and should normally be
21 Package maintainers are strongly encouraged to merge any contributions
22 for support of any init system, and to add
23 that support themselves if they're willing and capable of doing so.
24 In particular, package maintainers should put a high priority on
25 merging changes to support any init system which is the default on one
26 of Debian's non-Linux ports.
28 For the jessie release, all packages that currently support being run
29 under sysvinit should continue to support sysvinit unless there is no
30 technically feasible way to do so. Reasonable changes to preserve or
31 improve sysvinit support should be accepted through the jessie
32 release. There may be some loss of functionality under sysvinit if
33 that loss is considered acceptable by the package maintainer and the
34 package is still basically functional. All packages should support
35 smooth upgrades from wheezy to jessie, including upgrades done on a
36 system booted with sysvinit.
38 The Technical Committee offers no advice at this time on requirements
39 or package dependencies on specific init systems after the jessie
40 release. There are too many variables at this point to know what the
41 correct course of action will be.