On 2020-08-16, the Technical Committee was informally (by the means of a single IRC message) notified that we should probably look into bug #959828. We thus discussed it in our monthly meeting, that was held three days later.
During our last meeting, we all thought sharing the points we all agreed upon in the meeting would be helpful at this point in the disagreement; if it's not, that's fine, but hopefully it can help make some progress. What follows is not a formal Technical Committee ruling or opinion; full meeting logs can be followed at: http://meetbot.debian.net/debian-ctte/2020/debian-ctte.2020-08-19-17.59.log.html#l-186 First of all, there was consensus amongst all tech-ctte members that the 'systemctl' package (to which we will, for clarity, refer using its full project name, 'docker-systemctl-replacement') declaring "Provides: systemd" is not correct, as the interfaces that define systemd clearly far exceed docker-systemctl-replacement. Several amongst us also showed concern that the package name "systemctl" might be misleading for some users; the package could probably be renamed. For reference, upstream's project name is "docker-systemctl-replacement". Some ideas have been floated, although they might not be complete nor fully discussed, regarding how systemd's functionality could be expressed not only monolithically, but referring to its main interfaces. An example can be found at: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=959828#129 The use case for docker-systemctl-replacement is quite legitimate and common; containers will often not need to support a full-fledged init system. And given that php-fpm, the package in quesiton, closely fits the container use case, we feel important to urge the php-fpm maintainers to work constructively to find a suitable way to describe the needed dependencies so that php-fpm can be installed in a containerized system without a full init system. For fullness of references, the bug report tracking the conflict between the systemctl and php-fpm packages is #959174. - Gunnar Wolf Debian Technical Committee member
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