Announce: Vivid will switch to booting with systemd next Monday, brace for impact

[Martin Pitt]

Hello all,

it should be no secret any more, but it'll get serious now: we will
switch Ubuntu Vivid to boot with systemd instead of upstart. That is,
desktop, server, cloud/autopkgtests (that already happened two days
ago), and all flavors. snappy has used systemd from day one. We will
*not* switch Ubuntu Touch, however [1].

As per the feature freeze exception [2] this is scheduled to happen on
Monday. Technically, this will flip around the preferred dependency of
"init" to "systemd-sysv | upstart", which will affect new installs,
but not upgrades. Upgrades will be switched by adding "systemd-sysv"
to ubuntu-standard's dependencies.

So if you already want to do this change today, you can switch today
already if you want. If you never booted your system with systemd
before, it's advisable to do an one-time boot first. Please see

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers#Switching_init_systems

for details. This also explains how to move back to upstart for one
boot or permanently.

If you run into any trouble, please do file a bug (ubuntu-bug
systemd)! I'll do my best to keep up with them. Please have a look at
/usr/share/doc/systemd/README.Debian for some debugging tips.

Contingency plan: If after some weeks we find that there are too many
or too big regressions, we can revert to upstart by default with two
simple uploads (ubuntu-standard and init).

Thanks,

Martin

[1] This is blocked on most platforms currently running an ancient 3.4
kernel. Also, there's some porting work to do on the upstart jobs, but
that's low priority due to the former.

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1427654
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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