Bug#946197: Let's switch to OpenRC?

[Thomas Goirand]

Source: sysvinit
Severity: normal

Dear sysvinit maintainers,

OpenRC is actively maintained upstream, and is a full replacement of sysv-rc,
including many improvements.

Currently, packages are stuck with long, non-declarative sysv-rc scripts, and
cannot switch to superior runscripts, interpreted by /sbin/openrc-run, which
enable declarative-only scripts.

So, my proposal is to get rid of sysv-rc provided by sysvinit, in the favor of
OpenRC, so that developers can start replacing their init scripts by superior
runscripts.

Note that this doesn't mean we completely get rid of the sysvinit source
package, as we still need a large chunk of it, like for example the PID 1 in
OpenRC can continue to be sysvinit. We also probably need other components,
like for example bootlogd, sysvinit-utils, and maybe others.

I'm opening this discussion in the BTS, as I would like to see what the opinion
of sysvinit maintainers is.

I'm also unsure what would be technically needed to get sysv-rc automatically
be replaced by OpenRC. Maybe we could make sysv-rc become a metapackage that
depends on OpenRC?

Your thoughts?

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)