[[!tag debian]]

Russ Allbery has written up summaries of the research he's done in preparation of a Debian Technical Committee vote on default init system in Debian's next release. The mails are long, and well worth reading completely if the topic interests you at all, but I'd like to quote separately a few paragraphs that I found thoughtful, and inspiring, in the greater Debian context and not just for the init system discussion.

From "init system other points, and conclusion":

Here again, I think we have an opportunity for Debian to be more innovative and forward-looking in what we attempt to accomplish in the archive by adopting frameworks that let us incorporate the principles of least privilege and defense in depth into our standard daemon configurations.

And later, from the same mail:

I think we should make wise decisions about which areas we want to invest project effort. I dislike investing significant project effort in catch-up efforts that, when complete, merely get us back to where we would have been if we'd chosen a different solution. I don't think that's wise stewardship of project resources. I want to see Debian focus its efforts on places where we can make a real difference, where we can be leaders. That means adopting the best-of-breed existing solutions and building on top of them, not reinventing wheels and thereby starting from a trailing position.

From "loose ends for init system decision":

It is not, in general, necessary to justify what you want to do in Debian. It doesn't matter if it's going to be used by thousands of people or two people. If you can do your work to the standards that we expect to be maintained across the archive, and without negative impact on Debian's other contributors, you can work on whatever you love. And, furthermore, we all support each other in our passions. Debian is built on a culture of deference to other people's work, and reasonable accomodation to the projects that other people want to work on.

Now, there is a fine balance here. Deference to other people's work does not mean a requirement to join their work. Reasonable accomodation does not mean that every Debian developer is required to test their software on non-Linux ports. The goal is that all of us should be empowered to work on the things we are passionate about, which implicitly includes being empowered to not work on the things that are not of interest to us. Therefore, for some efforts, and specifically for the non-Linux port efforts, the work is mostly born by the porters. They're expected to test, diagnose problems, and submit patches. The deference and reasonable accomodation that we expect of Debian contributors is to merge those patches when they are reasonable, to not undermine the porting effort when there is a reasonable approach that preserves it, and to be aware of the implications of their packaging for those ports in the broad sense (such as qualifying build-dependencies with [linux-any] where appropriate).

We do not expect Debian contributors to reject significant new upstream versions or significant new integrations because they will affect the non-Linux ports, or, for that matter, other projects in Debian. We do expect those changes to follow the standards that we expect of Debian as a whole, and that porting efforts will be treated with deference and reasonable accomodation.

I won't offer a comment on these quotes—I prefer to let them speak for themselves—but I will say I find these to be among the wisest things said within Debian all year.