[kafkaIncarnate]

They had about a 5 year "democratic" scream fest that ended when they decided to switch to SystemD (over upstart and other options) starting in Debian Jessie (roughly when I switched off Debian because I couldn't stand the shout matches anymore, not because I had a pony in the race).

https://www.debian.org/News/2015/20150426

So since April 25th, 2015.

The logic went, we didn't like PulseAudio, therefore we don't like the developer (Lennart Poettering). Lennart Poettering also made SystemD, therefore we automatically hate that. The main complaint was that it relied on DBUS.

Most of them switched to Gentoo because it supported OpenRC, ironically also reliant on DBUS.

EDIT: I found some additional strange results when trying to find the spelling of his name:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/lennart-poetterings-linus-torv...

https://bannedhipster.home.blog/2020/10/28/meet-your-nsa-han...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.misc/c/wnFJ3-QDKdE

Looks like they believe SystemD is an attempt by the NSA to infiltrate and spy on Linux users.

[binarybanana]

>OpenRC, ironically also reliant on DBUS.

Not at all, although if you have any services that use dbus it might get started by one of them. On my system there isn't even a dbus service file that could be used to start dbus directly through OpenRC. OpenRC works fine without any dbus installed, in fact I'm not even sure if it's even used for any functionality at all. Service control is done through a socket in /var/run/openrc/control (or something), at least on any system configuration I've seen.

[kafkaIncarnate]

Interesting. I was basing this mostly on my most recent install of Gentoo, but it seems that even Gentoo's documentation is misleading on this subject.

Without systemd, you "need" elogind as a requirement which is a drop in replacement for systemd-logind. elogind relies on dbus, and in Gentoo needs to contact /run/dbus/system_bus_socket.

However, looking into it, it appears this is largely because of display manager compatibility. If you don't need a display manager, you very well might not need elogind, which means you might not need dbus. So OpenRC for embedded, deciding to manually control execution of your WM with Wayland or X11, or headless servers could still work, but you would need dbus to get display managers to work. I've been reading some blogs of people attempting to do exactly this and they seem to only get into issues with Gentoo and Debian without using elogind or systemd. That doesn't mean it's "required", though, they could just not know what they are doing.

When I was installing Gentoo I was using stage3 of hardened-selinux-openrc, I also had a huge issue enabling SELinux and it kept blocking OpenRC's access to DBus before finishing the boot sequence. I assume this was due to the elogind USE flag, but it seems it had compiled into it somehow, because I didn't initially have elogind turned on. I guess I just didn't know the relationship of elogind and OpenRC (not that this has made anything any clearer), I might actually try rebuilding that system's @world without the "elogind" USE flag just to see what happens (I don't really need a display manager anyway).

[binarybanana]

>If you don't need a display manager, you very well might not need elogind,

Yes, that's how I do it. At boot a service auto-logins on all vts and fires up an X server with my WM. Since I already have to enter a password to decrypt the disk this is OK. After half an hour idle/suspend the screen gets locked, so it's not worse than no auto-login.

Sadly, the documentation and wiki has detoriated in quality the last few years. For example I recently tried to look up how to run Xorg without suid, but the wiki had removed the simpler input-group based method in favor of this elogind stuff, which I consider to be worse than useless. Luckily the talk page pointed me in the right direction (history).

Personally, I put -* in make.conf's USE variable and only enable a few things I really want universally like threads, unicode, etc. Then I use flaggie to enable the flags I need when installing stuff. I check with emerge -a to get a list of everything with the possible flags, then enable/disable as necessary. Takes a bit longer the first time, but prevents stuff like this. Sometimes it can break stuff since that's not a supported configuration and might expose undeclared USE flag dependencies, but it's mostly OK.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

That's all unrelated to my point; per your first link:

> The sysvinit init system is still available in "Jessie".

I was asking if this had since changed, since last I'd paid attention you could in fact run Debian without systemd.

[kafkaIncarnate]

Okay bad link. Apparently the jessie support for sysvinit is mostly because the service files were still there. It seems they didn't have any intention of maintaining those services, and other software that requires the use of it would simply fail to work if you installed sysvinit because much of it required the usage of systemd and/or dbus.

https://lwn.net/Articles/585319/ https://www.itwire.com/open-source/debian-revisits-systemd-v...

So, I guess I assumed that since there was hysteria around systemd becoming the default and the non-systemd users needing to create a new fork (Devuan) to get SystemD out of their Debian installs, it might have been to be compatible with other software:

https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/

"As many of you might know already, the Init GR Debian vote promoted by Ian Jackson wasn't useful to protect Debian's legacy and its users from the systemd avalanche.

This situation prospects a lock in systemd dependencies which is de-facto threatening freedom of development and has serious consequences for Debian, its upstream and its downstream."

Choice 2:B is also the "new" decision to expand and allow exploring alternatives to SystemD in 2019, which is a change I was unaware of as well:

https://lwn.net/Articles/804254/ https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002#textb

I'm sure this won't satisfy you, but I'm done. I've followed this for far too long as it is, and I don't need to rehash more dumb mailing list arguments.