The fate of Upstart

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On 28 November 2014 at 12:41, Ben Tinner <bentinner at yahoo.com.sg> wrote:
> Hello
>
>
> Recently, the developers of Ubuntu have decided to migrate the init system
> from upstart to systemd.
>
> So, I would like to find out what will happen to upstart after Ubuntu
> complete its transition to systemd.
>
> Will development of upstart be abandoned after the transition is completed?

At the moment Ubuntu Phone, Ubuntu (and derivatives) and ChromeOS are
the largest users of Upstart.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is a long-term supported release, 5 years, until 2019.

Similarly, 16.04 LTS is not yet planned, thus i'm not sure whether it
will or won't ship upstart. If it does, it will be another 5 years
from then, or 2021.

I do not know the support time-frames of the phone product, it's a
question for Canonical and their partners, rather than the Ubuntu
project. But at the moment it is based on Upstart as well.

2019-2021 is far enough into the future that all predictions are moot.
Upstart is very large and stable piece of software and it is not under
active (rewrite) / feature work. Thus latest work is mostly focused on
extending and creating optional features or fixing corner case bugs in
the core.

One of the largest portions of work that is not merged is incomplete
support for FreeBSD kernel (and GNU user-space) as shipped by the
Debian kFreeBSD port. That has stalled a bit, since my interests have
shifted and Debian kFreeBSD port is no longer planned for
"official-official" release.

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.