Breaking init switch

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi Mark, hi Lorenzo.

Mark Hindley - 23.02.25, 10:06:43 MEZ:
> Iain's original submission in #940965 was about forced switch to systemd
> by apt not finding a solution with sysvinit. Adding Protected: yes
> would appear to prevent such behaviour.
> 
> I have just tried switching from sysvinit-core/experimental to
> runit-init and the only way that succeeds for me is to use
> 
>   DPKG_FORCE=remove-protected dpkg --remove sysvinit-core
> 
> followed by
> 
>  apt install runit-init
> 
> So it is still possible to switch. Views may differ as to if this is too
> difficult or dangerous. My personal gut feeling is that switching init
> on a system is a rare occurence, so the extra dpkg
> --force-remove-protected step isn't a great overhead. Also, people do
> not wish to discover their init has been changed 'incidentally' by apt.
> But I would appreciate hearing other perspectives.

Is this documented somewhere?

Maybe alternative init's should include such information in their readme 
or news at least as a pointer to a page in Debian wiki or something like 
that. At least I think it would be good to tell users how they can do it, 
especially about a change like setting sysvinit package to protected.

One reason for me to switch to Devuan completely for my private machines 
was: I was fed up with how difficult it was to switch away from Systemd in 
Debian. At that time at least. Unnecessarily so. In Devuan I select from a 
set of init systems – Sysvinit, OpenRC, Runit – in the installer. Done. 
But it is also easy enough to switch later.

If we can make this work better within Debian that would be great.

Best,
-- 
Martin