On December 7, 2019, the status of non-systemd init systems was put to a developer vote in the Debian project. The options the project had to choose from were:
- F: Focusing on systemd
- B: Systemd, but we support the exploration of alternative solutions
- A: Support for multiple init systems is important
- D: We support non-systemd systems, but don't block progress because of them
- H: Maintain portability but don't block progress
- E: Support for multiple init systems is required
- G: Support portability and multiple implementations of interfaces
- Further discussion
The full text of each option can be read in an official letter from the Debian Secretary.
The voting period expired at midnight UTC on December 28, 2019.
Debian uses a fairly complex voting system β Schulze method. When voting, each participant ranks all options in order of personal preference.
The Schulze method satisfies the Condorcet criterion: if one of the options would win in a pairwise comparison of each other, then it is declared the winner. In this vote, that option turned out to be option B ("Systemd, but we support the exploration of alternative solutions"). As a result, it became mandatory.
In practice, this means that the lack of an init script in the daemon package is no longer a bug.
Source: linux.org.ru