Ian Jackson's general resolution to prevent init system coupling has failed to pass, the majority vote deciding that the resolution is unnecessary. This means that not only will Debian's default init be systemd, but packages will not be required to support other init systems. Presumably, this means that using other init systems on Debian (without using systemd as a base) will not be possible without major workarounds, or possibly at all. It also leaves the future of Debian projects such as kFreeBSD unclear, as systemd is linux specific.
The vote results can be found here
The winners are:
Option 4 "General Resolution is not required"
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:02AM
I do not want systemd, systemd-shim or a modular re-implementation of systemd. And that was before inexcusable issues such as the DNS cache ignoring recommendations in RFC5452.
I think you are vastly underestimating the scale of problems in systemd and I ask you to consider how many times you are prepared to be burned.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:25AM
Meh. I don't want systemd, but I also didn't want HAL or dbus, either. Especially HAL, which was extremely fragile and fraught with problems for a very long time. I got stuck with them too, and learned to deal with it. I especially hated udev, because the initial adoption was a mess and broke a lot of things I had carefully set up, but nowadays it's actually a pretty useful thing. As long as it's not the init and not forcing its own DNS and other bullshit, I can deal with it being another lame dbus/HAL piece of shit that will eventually become more mature. (Maybe one day it'll even become a useful piece of shit like udev eventually did, but I wouldn't take those odds.)
Right now thanks to the shim package, it's doing almost nothing on my system, and I can tolerate that. If it annoys me enough despite that, I can safely remove it and only lose some convenience stuff. I can tolerate that option, too. No reason to jump ship to BSD just yet, and definitely no reason to switch away from Debian when the alternatives don't even have the shim, making them less flexible than Debian regarding systemd.
If/when something happens to change the landscape further, I'll worry about switching to something else. Right now it would be premature.