Comment 7 for bug 1855140

Hi Christian

According to https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002#outcome the decision was to use "Systemd but we support exploring alternatives". From the proposal:

"Packages should include service units or init scripts to start daemons and services. Packages may use any systemd facility at the package maintainer's discretion, provided that this is consistent with other Policy requirements and the normal expectation that packages shouldn't depend on experimental or unsupported (in Debian) features of other packages. Packages may include support for alternate init systems besides systemd and may include alternatives for any systemd-specific interfaces they use. Maintainers use their normal procedures for deciding which patches to include."

From my understanding this means that supporting an alternative init system is optional ("Packages may include support for alternate init systems besides systemd"). So basically this is up to the package maintainer whether or not the package should support an alternative init system.

Given the (still rising) popularity of Docker/Kubernetes containers, it would indeed by very nice that the affected packages (such as haproxy) do adjust for a non-systemd environment.