727708: coupling proposal: Russ: <87k3d01ag5.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu>

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+    The following is technical advice offered to the project by the
+    Technical Committee under section 6.1.5 of the constitution.  It does
+    not constitute an override of maintainer decisions past or future:
+
+    Packages should normally support the default Linux init system.  There
+    are some exceptional cases where lack of support for the default init
+    system may be appropriate, such as alternative init system
+    implementations, special-use packages such as managers for non-default
+    init systems, and cooperating groups of packages intended for use with
+    non-default init systems.  However, package maintainers should be
+    aware that a requirement for a non-default init system will mean the
+    package will be unusable for most Debian users and should normally be
+    avoided.
+
+    Package maintainers are strongly encouraged to merge any contributions
+    for support of init systems other than the Linux default, and to add
+    that support themselves if they're willing and capable of doing so.
+    In particular, package maintainers should put a high priority on
+    merging changes to support any init system which is the default on one
+    of Debian's non-Linux ports.
+
+    For the jessie release, all packages that currently support being run
+    under sysvinit should continue to support sysvinit unless there is no
+    technically feasible way to do so.  Reasonable changes to preserve or
+    improve sysvinit support should be accepted through the jessie
+    release.  There may be some loss of functionality under sysvinit if
+    that loss is considered acceptable by the package maintainer and the
+    package is still basically functional.  All packages should support
+    smooth upgrades from wheezy to jessie, including upgrades done on a
+    system booted with sysvinit.
+
+    The Technical Committee offers no advice at this time on requirements
+    or package dependencies on specific init systems after the jessie
+    release.  There are too many variables at this point to know what the
+    correct course of action will be.