This page documents the position statement of individuals who suggest that Debian should adopt upstart as the default init system. Before editing this page, please see the instructions on how debates work. If you are not the maintainer of a position statement, and have a suggestion or change to make, please contact the maintainer.

Upstart Position Statement

Upstart is a modern, well-tested, event-based init system. It is used on tens or hundreds of millions of servers, desktops, cloud instances and embedded systems throughout the world. Debian should adopt it as the default init system for the jessie release.

Pros

Cons

Upstart vs. SysV init

We've gotten a lot of mileage out of sysvinit in Debian, but its limits have been showing for a while - indeed, it was these limits that led to upstart being written in the first place.

There is no reasonable justification for Debian continuing to inflict sysvinit's limitations on users today.

Upstart vs. SystemD

In terms of overall feature uplift of the init system itself, there is really rather little to distinguish upstart from systemd. Both would represent a huge step forward for Debian over sysvinit. If Debian did not adopt upstart, systemd would certainly be my second choice.

But despite the init systems being comparable at the feature level, there are reasons that I think upstart is a better fit for Debian than systemd.

Rebuttals

Position Statement Maintainers

Comments