not-systemd status in Bullseye?

[Mark Hindley]

Matthew,

On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 08:42:57PM +0000, Matthew Vernon wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is the expectation that sysvinit will plausibly work in Bullseye?

The short answer from the logind perspective is yes I think so. But I haven't
actually tried for a few months.

I am hoping to get src:elogind 243.7 packaged in the next few weeks.

> I see elogind and libpam-elogind are in bullseye, but libpam-elogind-compat is
> still only in experimental.

libpam-elogind-compat is only required for dependencies which haven't been
fixed. Many have now, although xfce4-session is still outstanding and lightdm
libpam-elogind support is incomplete (#932047).

> I have a fresh bullseye system that has systemd on (because no option in the
> installer), which runs fvwm and lightdm, but I'm not sure how likely a move
> to sysvinit is to work - AFAICS, systemd prerm will refuse to run if systemd
> is init, making switching hard...
> 
> Any suggestions / pointers / help, please?

Yes. I have used 2 workarounds for that.

 1) Reboot with init=/bin/sh and replace systemd-sysv whilst systemd is not PID1.
 2) Install sysvinit-core (which will remove systemd-sysv), reboot, remove
 systemd and make the rest of the switch, reboot again.

 The problem with this approach is that libpam-systemd depends on systemd-sysv
 and replacing it will take the whole session manager stack with it. The bug to
 change that to recommends was rejected (#935304).

 You can work around it by editing /var/lib/dpkg/status and removing that
 dependency before installing sysvinit-core. It works for me, but is not an
 approach that we can really recommend as a solution

Let me know how you get on.

Good luck!

Mark