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Can you reference that poll? There was a GR, which is entirely different than a poll. The outcome of that was also pretty clear, Debian as a whole is ok to depend a bit more on systemd. I don't get why you use it as an example of the opposite.

See https://lwn.net/Articles/808217/ for the outcome of the GR.

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It is indeed this GR.

I might be misinterpreting the result, but "Systemd but we support exploring alternatives" means, to me, that there is some unhappiness here. To begin with, I believe the GR would not have happened if there was no issue to be discussed?

The GR happened because it wasn't clear what maintainers should do regarding alternatives init systems. Were they required to support them? Should they just focus on Systemd? The result of the vote was maintainers are required to support Systemd, but should accept patches to support other units.

The unhappiness was that the existing status quo made people afraid to actually use features of systemd, lest they invite flames from people about not supporting alternatives (which don't have those features). The GR changes the status quo to allow hard dependencies on systemd to actually use its features. The "but we support exploring alternatives" ensures that the GR does not preclude the possibility that people might create something better than systemd in the future.

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