Removing legacy distro support?

[Jesse Smith]

On 7/3/19 10:36 AM, Jesse Smith wrote:
> 
>> I don't know if SUSE actively removes init scripts, but even if it does
>> not, what is left is certainly severely bitrotten, likely to a point of
>> unusability.
>>
> 
> This is what I thought too. Though I received a message yesterday from
> someone who pointed out that openSUSE Factory and Tumbleweed not only
> still have sysvinit packages, these packages are updated to the latest
> version. Someone in the SUSE community is keeping sysvinit software up
> to date in their repositories, even if it is rarely (ever?) used.
> 
> Now I am tempted to install openSUSE and see if it will run with
> sysvinit. If it's used at all (or can be used as an alternative to
> systemd) I feel we should leave the support in place.
> 

I looked into this further and discovered a few things. The main one is
that while openSUSE still maintains a sysvinit package, it is available
as a source archive (srpm) only. There has been no binary package for a
few years. Which would indicate no one is using the package its source
code is just there, for some reason.

This seems to be pretty strong evidence that sysvinit is no longer used
by SUSE users and support for the distro can be dropped upstream. We can
also revert the change later if I'm wrong.

- Jesse