Bug#1015015: unable to upgrade due to elogind vs systemd conflict

[Craig Sanders]

Package: elogind
Version: 246.9.1-1+debian1

I don't know if a newer version of elogind would help here, but it
probably wouldn't hurt. elogind in debian hasn't been updated since
Dec 23.

# apt -u dist-upgade
[...]
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  alsa-firmware-loaders bluez brasero fwupd gnome-disk-utility
  gnome-session-bin gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-daemons i2c-tools kpartx
  lcdproc libblockdev-mdraid2 libtss2-esys-3.0.2-0 libtss2-mu0
  libtss2-sys1 libtss2-tcti-cmd0 libtss2-tcti-device0 libtss2-tcti-mssim0
  libtss2-tcti-swtpm0 linux-image-5.16.0-6-amd64 linux-image-5.17.0-3-amd64
  linux-image-5.18.0-2-amd64 linux-image-amd64 mdadm tpm-udev udisks2
  upower xfce4-power-manager xfce4-power-manager-plugins xserver-xorg
  xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse

Most of those I don't care about, but I really don't want linux-* packages or
mdadm or xserver-* packages to be force-removed.


Aborting that and running 'apt upgrade' just highlights the cause:

# apt -u upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 elogind : Conflicts: systemd
           Conflicts: systemd:i386
 libelogind0 : Conflicts: libsystemd0
               Conflicts: systemd
               Conflicts: systemd:i386
E: Broken packages




systemd creeps ever closer to de-facto Essential status in debian,
contradicting promises made during the init systems vote years
ago (but we always knew that the systemd pushers were lying about
that). Something in recent sid systemd depends directly on systemd,
conflicting with elogind and forcing removal of several packages with
dist-upgrade.

I gave up resisting the systemd borg years ago, except on this one
machine: every attempt to switch it over to systemd has failed - IT
WILL NOT BOOT AT ALL WITH SYSTEMD, so it has to stay on sysvinit.
Looks like that's not going to be viable any longer.

and the worst of it is that systemd actually makes a fairly decent
init system - nothing ground-breaking or innovative but certainly
adequate.  As init, it's good enough. It's all the other things that
it attempts to borg (and does a shitty half-arsed job of) that are
the problem: logind, policy kit, journald, shitty replacements for
ntp, dns resolver, grub, and much more. systemd would be OK if it
wasn't trying to do things an init system has no business doing, if
you didn't have to carefully check it on every upgrade to disable the
next thing it's incompetently trying to take over.



craig