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https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00174.html
Joey Hess has apparently left Debian after 18 years, stating that the Debian Constitution is leading Debian in "very unhealthy directions".
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(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday November 09 2014, @12:13AM
Remember that it was the Debian project that decided, against "common sense", that the root shell should be changed so some obscure minimal shell (dash), so that init scripts were forced to not depend on "bashisms" and to keep
Debian strictly compatible with any POSIX correct shell scripts.
Debian's TC decisions are usually a clear consensus, though. Major changes like that get approached cautiously, like Ents of the Linux world. This has been different, as I mentioned in this reply [soylentnews.org].
In my opinion, systemd is a problem for Linux, but not an *immanent* problem. But I spent 3 days rebuilding separate packages and downgrading my installation just to get rid of it. It's really much more "infectious" than it seems.
The problem I have is that it wants to take over init and logging and tie everything together. Some pieces of it don't bother me, or are at least tolerable, as long as they keep their tendrils out of init. I've been giving some of those parts a reluctant trial because of some software having dependencies on systemd's login service, though I'm still using systemd-shim to keep my init and logging non-systemd. Having systemd-logind has basically had no impact on my everyday use, other than some annoyingly verbose console vomit any time I drop to console and log in.
Like dbus, systemd does seem to provide some useful features for certain software, and it doesn't need to be your init to do so.
This is what I did to deinstall systemd on a partial-Wheezy partial-Jessie partial-Sid system:
rebuild libpulse0 without the libsystemd-journal dependency (surprise surprise)
rebuild dbus without the libsystemd-journal dependency
major surgery to get rid of libsystemd-daemon0 and libpam-systemd:
get rid of policykit colord accountsservice gvfs-daemons gnome samba kde libpam-systemd and cups
(I use LXDE after I gave up on KDE so I can do without gnome and KDE)
later on, downgrade-reinstall samba and cups so that you can print again.
It's worth noting that, unless it's just the principle of it for you, you can generally leave the libsystemd* type dependencies. They don't actually force systemd itself to install. They're just used to allow other parts of the system to interact with systemd if it's present, and otherwise don't matter beyond using a bit of space.
You can also still use KDE without any part of systemd installed, though I believe you lose some USB automount related stuff and maybe some power management related bits. Not KDE's fault, though; upower and udisks started relying on systemd, and there isn't anything KDE can do about it.
It's all going much too far...
Definitely. Though the same thing happened with dbus, udev, and some other parts of what is now a standard Linux system. When I started using Linux, neither thing existed, but they've both provided sufficient benefits to be considered tolerable. Some of the things systemd does could fall in the same category, and if they were approached in any other way (rather than requiring basically full system control), it would probably be far less contentious.