sysvinit VS initng VS upstart VS launchd (Was: Future New Init for FC7?)

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 10:57 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Thursday 05 April 2007 07:38:26 Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > I think this is a very wrong direction for fedora. Free software is
> > about choice. And also being able to test innovative technologies.
> > The default init system should be privileged, but all should be present,
> > such that power users are able to test and use them. The directions that
> > developers and packagers want to follow, how they spend their time is
> > their business. If there are enough people interested in new init
> > systems, lets have them. As a project we have to watch out the packaging
> > quality, the integration in the distro and have good defaults. Our
> > mandate should not to be in the way of initiatives.
> 
> At the same time, I don't want to stamp the Fedora name on something that has 
> 6 half working init system choices, but none that work fully.  It's the same 
> reason we don't ship 6 different kernel compiles (other than xen or no xen, 
> smp or no smp, these are because one won't work across all hardware 
> sets/systems).  Certain things in the distro have to be rock solid, the init 
> system is one of those.
> 
> Now, I'm all for seeing development happen and initiatives.  You can create a 
> secondary repo around trying out a new init system.  I just don't want to see 
> them clutter up the main repos that every user gets access to.

Are we going to unmerge Extras and Core for F8? ;-)

More seriously, I agree with Patrice that Fedora has a mandate to ship
new and in-development things for users to try if they don't conflict
with core components.  Since init systems can be parallel installed, I
think that they belong in the Fedora repository.

One thing that Patrice isn't stressing, however, is that using a
different initsystem usually requires writing new initscripts.  So we
need to have some policy about initscripts in Fedora.  Something like:

"""
Packages that are to be started at system startup must provide an
initscript for the default Fedora init system.  Here are <link>details
on writing an initscript</link> for SysVinit, our current default.  In
addition, other packagers may be interested in providing initscripts for
alternate init systems.  When this happens, the package should install
the alternate init script [Guidance on how].
"""

This is not a complete policy.  How is a very big question.  Subpackage?
The same package that provides SysVinit?  Who has responsibility for
submitting the alternate init scripts to upstream?  Should there be a
SIG that helps add support for different init systems?

-Toshio
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