Debian decision on systemd

 February 14, 2014

The Debian Technical Committee questioned which direction they should go concerning which PID1 to use in the last couple of weeks.

Ian Jackson, former Debian Project Leader and currently standing in the Debian Technical Committee, asked to vote on the 5th of February on the matter. Against Ian’s preference, the result of the vote is that Debian will use systemd as the default PID1. The result is a very narrow one since it was 4:4 with Upstart. The victory for systemd happened thanks to the tie-breaking vote of the Technical Committee chair, Bdale Garbee.

Ian also proposed to ask the Technical Committee to vote on the level of coupling that there should be between the PID1 and the other Debian packages. Still, Bdale Garbee expressed doubts on the Technical Committee’s authority on the matter, and therefore that part was not voted.

Overall, I think this is great news for Debian, systemd, and the wider community. Linux’s historical problem has been the lack of standards and coherence among distributions, and using the same PID1 is surely a good step toward more standardization.