1 A Advice: sysvinit compatibility in jessie and multiple init support
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4 The following is technical advice offered to the project by the
5 Technical Committee under section 6.1.5 of the constitution. It does
6 not constitute an override of maintainer decisions past or future.
8 Software should support as many architectures as reasonably possible,
9 and it should normally support the default init system on all
10 architectures for which it is built. There are some exceptional cases
11 where lack of support for the default init system may be appropriate,
12 such as alternative init system implementations, special-use packages
13 such as managers for non-default init systems, and cooperating
14 groups of packages intended for use with non-default init systems.
15 However, package maintainers should be aware that a requirement for a
16 non-default init system will mean the software will be unusable for
17 most Debian users and should normally be avoided.
19 Package maintainers are strongly encouraged to merge any contributions
20 for support of any init system, and to add that support themselves if
21 they're willing and capable of doing so. In particular, package
22 maintainers should put a high priority on merging changes to support
23 any init system which is the default on one of Debian's non-Linux
26 For the jessie release, all software that currently supports being run
27 under sysvinit should continue to support sysvinit unless there is no
28 technically feasible way to do so. Reasonable changes to preserve
29 or improve sysvinit support should be accepted through the jessie
30 release. There may be some loss of functionality under sysvinit if
31 that loss is considered acceptable by the package maintainer and
32 the package is still basically functional, but Debian's standard
33 requirement to support smooth upgrades from wheezy to jessie still
34 applies, even when the system is booted with sysvinit.
36 The Technical Committee offers no advice at this time on sysvinit
37 support beyond the jessie release. There are too many variables at
38 this point to know what the correct course of action will be.