On Fri, 03 Mar 2017 07:25:13 -0500 The Wanderer <wande...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On 2017-03-02 at 13:01, Patrick Bartek wrote: > > > I've been considering Stretch as a clean install or dist-upgrade of > > my aging Wheezy desktop setup as well as to install on a new > > notebook I've yet to decide on. I don't like systemd (why is > > unimportant to this query). I plan to use some other init system, > > probably runit. So ... > > > > Just how dependent has Stretch's system become on systemd? I don't > > mean applications or GNOME, etc. with systemd dependency that I can > > choose not to install, but the system itself, the guts, the basics, > > the things and tools it needs to work properly. > > There are two packages which are in some sense "part of" systemd which > you will not be able to avoid: libsystemd0 and udev. udev I knew about. (Also, udisks2.) But there are udev alternatives that don't have any systemd dependency. One is eudev from the Gentoo people, IIRC. It's suppose to be platform independent.. > libsystemd0 is the "detect at runtime whether systemd is present" > library; it's what makes it possible for programs to use systemd when > it's there, but still work when it isn't. It might _technically_ be > possible to avoid this, but one of the packages which depends on this > is xserver-xorg-core, so for most systemd that will not be a practical > option. Had heard about that dependency. I'm sure there are others that have yet to be discovered. That's one of the reasons I dislike systemd. > udev wasn't originally a systemd thing, but is now maintained by the > systemd people, and apparently shipped from the same source package > (or at least I can't see any other reason why changes to udev would > appear in apt-listchanges under the name of "systemd"). > > Those are the only systemd-related packages on my current primary > machine (unless you count systemd-shim, which exists specifically to > make avoiding systemd itself possible), and I've been running it with > no apparent related issues for pretty much the entire time since the > systemd transition. Know about systemd-shim from my tests with Jessie.. Read some time ago, it was to be dropped from Stretch. > > I do have to keep an eye on 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and on normal > package installs to make sure that nothing pulls in libpam-systemd > and then systemd automatically - but it's been quite a while since > anything tried to do that, and even that would only get systemd as a > "normal" daemon rather than as the init system. > > systemd as the init system is provided by the systemd-sysv package. I > have that package pinned to never install in /etc/preferences: > > Package: systemd-sysv > Pin: version * > Pin-Priority: -1 > > but this doesn't seem to be entirely effective in some cases, for > reasons I've given up on trying to track down; still, it may be > making a difference. All that's why I consider systemd so insidious. It forces you to use it whether you want to or not. Something Microsoft has been doing to their users for decades. ;-) Thanks for all the great info. B