I've gone to FreeBSD for now on my personal dev box, I'm a real sucker for a dead simple /etc/rc.conf like Arch used to have and their system philosophy seems more in line with my own anyways.
Very glad to hear we have a major binary distro like Debian committing to init system flexibility this strongly. I just hope it's true. The people who are hesitant can experiment and stay where they are for now, moving only when it's actually desired rather than forced.
We'll see how this develops, but this ain't Gentoo, I wouldn't count on Debian to keep supporting sysv. Quote from Debian forums:
it's very unlikely that SysVinit will continue to be supported, because writing init scripts for SysVinit is hard work, and if it isn't used as the default on Linux they'll rot.
Well, this post and http://lwn.net/Articles/616571/ does seem to indicate they're planning to keep some level of compatibility with other init systems at least.
I'm not in love with sysvinit, I just don't think systemd is the best option. It clashes, at least with my views on simplistic system design philosophy. OpenRC and FreeBSD's rc seem notably better than both systemd and sysvinit to me.
I agree with everything you said, my point was that it's necessary to be prepared, in case systemd becomes a hard dependency for Debian, which is likely given that more software is depending on systemd, and the lead developer is trying to "merge" linux with systemd. And in that case, I think only Gento is willing to fork.
Well, it took some RTFMing, but overall it seems quite good. The ports system is great and it has a lot of simple stuff I really like, like having a list of vulnerable packages emailed to root automatically every night by default.
Very glad to hear we have a major binary distro like Debian committing to init system flexibility this strongly. I just hope it's true. The people who are hesitant can experiment and stay where they are for now, moving only when it's actually desired rather than forced.