systemd for 11.10 ?

[James Hunt]

Hi Martin,

On 09/05/11 21:01, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Steve Langasek [2011-05-09 12:36 +0200]:
>> It's one thing to have a rollback plan for which desktop experience is
>> shipped by default; that touches a handful of closely related packages.
>> It's quite another to try to roll back an init system change, which touches
>> every single package that's involved with system startup and requires
>> changes across a very broad set of foundations, desktop, and server
>> packages.
> 
> If we should ever do the migration to systemd,
.. Which to be clear, we are not considering currently.

 then we should
> certainly not drop the upstart integration/jobs along the way, but
> keep both upstart and systemd jobs in the packages for a while (at
> least until the next LTS), so that you can switch between the two with
> the init= kernel parameter (that's in fact how you can test systemd on
> Debian/Ubuntu/everywhere else today).
I agree in principle that we should do this *should* we ever consider
moving to systemd, but there is the issue of ensuring that both the
Upstart and the systemd jobs are guaranteed to result in the same
behaviour. How we would do this, I don't currently know.

  Then rolling back is by and
> large just a seed change, and perhaps flipping back an option in grub.
Well, let's not forget that we are about to put Upstart into the
initramfs for Oneiric. Removing Upstart is not in any plan I'm aware of,
but to be clear to all, *if* we ever did do it, it would take a
**considerable** effort to do IMHO so would need very careful
justification, planning, and extremely thorough testing.

> 
> This would even allow us to do things like installing systemd for new
> installs, but keeping upstart for upgrades until there is a transition
> plan for how to deal with custom upstart jobs that administrators
> created (which seems to be the most difficult thing to handle in the
> transition).
> 
> Martin
> 
> 

James