727708: coupling proposal: Andi's amendments to Russ's proposal <20140221121535.GV127...

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+A  Advice: sysvinit compatibility in jessie and multiple init support
+=====================================================================
+
+    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.
+
+    Software should support as many architectures as reasonably possible,
+    and it should normally support the default init system on all
+    architectures for which it is built.  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 software will be unusable for
+    most Debian users and should normally be avoided.
+
+    Package maintainers are strongly encouraged to merge any contributions
+    for support of any init system, 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 software that currently supports 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, but Debian's standard
+    requirement to support smooth upgrades from wheezy to jessie still
+    applies, even when the system is booted with sysvinit.
+
+    The Technical Committee offers no advice regarding sysvinit
+    compatibility at this time after the jessie release.  There are too
+    many variables at this point to know what the correct course of action
+    will be.