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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