[Foxboron]

>But this was one of the critical elements of the system and they had to fork the entire distro because the way it was done actually made the choice more limited.

This isn't very accurate. When Debian decided to switch to systemd, they also agreed to support other inits in the distribution.

This wasn't good enough, so Devuan itself was forked before this decision was made. The end result is that Debian had less people to support the init script alternatives. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I'm confident Debian could support other inits if there was more Debian devs available to work on it. But because people left for Devuan the pool becomes smaller.

Even the last decision on inits from Debian says that the focus should not solely be on systemd.

https://lwn.net/Articles/808217/

[denton-scratch]

> they also agreed to support other inits in the distribution.

That's true, but with systemd being the only init that packages had to support. Accordingly many package maintainers choose to only support systemd.

So if you want to run Debian without systemd, you have to be prepared for your fave packages to drop support for the other inits. It follows that you can't rely on the Debian package repository. So to support a Debian-like system without systemd, you have to fork the whole repository.

[Foxboron]

I think the situation would have been better if the people opposed to Debian would contribute to better init script support then just forking it.

[denton-scratch]

Hey, I'm not opposed to Debian!

Devuan has init-script support for the packages in its repository. So it's open to the Debian maintainers to pull the scripts in; but they only want to support one init system, understandably. And the fact that nearly all other distros have systemd as a default init, it's natural that developers and maintainers are pleased with the systemd hegemony.

I'm just sorry that Debian made the decision it did. But Debian has always been the developers and maintainers; only incidentally the users. They were entitled to make that decision, and I think their process was exemplary.

[Edit] That "exemplary" process: actually I think it shouldn't have been pushed to the technical committee. It should have been a simple general resolution from the start. But I think the result would have been the same, and I found the debates very illuminating.