With Bdale Garbee's tie-breaking vote this week, the Debian technical committee finally resolved the initialization issue for Debian and Ubuntu, in favor of systemd.
I would like to thank the committee for their thoughtful debate under pressure in the fishbowl ; it set a high bar for analysis and experience-based decision-making, as most committee members had clearly taken the time to familiarize themselves with both options. I know that the people working on Upstart appreciated the praise for its code quality, rigorous testing, and clarity of purpose, even from members who voted against it. From my perspective, it was a pleasure to support the efforts of people who want to create great free software and do it properly. Upstart served Ubuntu quite well—it gave us a great competitive advantage at a time when things were getting very dynamic in Ubuntu, and it was very stable (after all, it's the init system used in both Ubuntu and RHEL 6). It has set a high standard for Canonical software quality, which I'm proud of.
However, they opted for systemd , and since Ubuntu is fundamentally a member of the Debian family, it's a decision we support . I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd to both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously. It will undoubtedly take time to achieve the stability and coverage we enjoy today and in 14.04 LTS with Upstart, but I will ask the Ubuntu tech board (several of whose members do not work at Canonical) to review the position and draw up appropriate transition plans . We will certainly complete the work so that the new logind works without systemd as PID 1. I hope they will want to bring systemd to Ubuntu as a developer option as soon as it is reliably available in Debian, and as soon as our default init offers a credible quality of service comparable to the existing init.
The technologies of choice evolve, and our platform evolves both to lead (today our focus is cloud and mobile, and we are clearly leading GNU / Linux on both fronts) and to embrace the changes imposed elsewhere. The init is contentious because it is required by both developers and sysadmins to understand its quirks and capabilities. It is not surprising that it was a difficult debate, the consequences for hundreds of thousands of people are very high. From my perspective, the fact that good people have divided suggests that either option would work perfectly well. I am confident that the new PID 1 butlers will take that responsibility as seriously as the Upstart team did, and will be as enjoyable to work with. And ... forward.
It was a very tough decision for Ubuntu! I'm sure it wasn't easy for them. I think it is the right decision, of course.
I would like to welcome Ubuntu to the systemd community! I look forward to a fruitful collaboration! Let's hope we can put the past behind us and work together in the future!
