First let me note that I am using systemd, so these things here are untested by me. See e.g. Petter’s and Simon’s blog entries on the same overall topic.

According to the Debian installer maintainers, the only accepted way to install Debian with sysvinit is to use preseeding. This can either be done at the installer boot prompt by manually typing the magic spell:

preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core"

or by using a preseeding file (which is a really nice feature I used for installing my Hadoop nodes) to do the same:

d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core

If you are a sysadmin, using preseeding can save you a lot of typing. Put all your desired configuration into preseeding files, put them on a webserver (best with a short name resolvable by local DNS). Let’s assume you have set up the DNS name d-i.example.com, and your DHCP is configured such that example.com is on the DNS search list. You can also add a vendor extension to DHCP to serve a full URL. Manually enabling preseeding then means adding

auto url=d-i

to the installer boot command line (d-i is the hostname I suggested to set up in your DNS before, and the full URL would then be http://d-i.example.com/d-i/jessie/./preseed.cfg. Preseeding is well documented in Appendix B of the installer manual, but nevertheless will require a number of iterations to get everything work as desired for a fully automatic install like I used for my Hadoop nodes.


There might be an easier option.
I have filed a wishlist bug suggesting to use the tasksel mechanism to allow the user to choose sysvinit at installation time. However, it got turned down by the Debian installer maintainers quire rudely in a “No.” - essentially this is a “shut the f… up and go away”, which is in my opinion an inappropriate to discard a reasonable user wishlist request.

Since I don’t intend to use sysvinit anymore, I will not be pursuing this option further. It is, as far as I can tell, still untested. If it works, it might be the least-effort, least-invasive option to allow the installation of sysvinit Jessie (except for above command line magic).

If you have interest in sysvinit, you (because I don’t use sysvinit) should now test if this approach works.

  1. Get the patch proposed to add a task-sysvinit package.
  2. Build an installer CD with this tasksel (maybe this documentation is helpful for this step).
  3. Test whether the patch works. Report results to above bug report, so that others interested in sysvinit can find them easily.
  4. Find and fix bugs if it didn’t work. Repeat.
  5. Publish the modified (“forked”) installer, and get user feedback.

If you are then still up for a fight, you can try to convince the maintainers (or go the nasty way, and ask the CTTE for their opinion, to start another flamewar and make more maintainers give up) that this option should be added to the mainline installer. And hurry up, or you may at best get this into Jessie reloaded, 8.1. - chance are that the release manager will not accept such patches this late anymore. The sysvinit supporters should have investigated this option much, much earlier instead of losing time on the GR.

Again, I won’t be doing this job for you. I’m happy with systemd. But patches and proof-of-concept is what makes open source work, not GRs and MikeeUSA’s crap videos spammed to the LKML…

(And yes, I am quite annoyed by the way the Debian installer maintainers handled the bug report. This is not how open-source collaboration is supposed to work. I tried to file a proper wishlist bug reporting, suggesting a solution that I could not find discussed anywhere before and got back just this “No. Shut up.” answer. I’m not sure if I will be reporting a bug in debian-installer ever again, if this is the way they handle bug reports …)

I do care about our users, though. If you look at popcon “vote” results, we have 4179 votes for sysvinit-core and 16918 votes for systemd-sysv (graph) indicating that of those already testing jessie and beyond - neglecting 65 upstart votes, and assuming that there is no bias to not-upgrade if you prefer sysvinit - about 20% appear to prefer sysvinit (in fact, they may even have manually switched back to sysvinit after being upgraded to systemd unintentionally?). These are users that we should listen to, and that we should consider adding an installer option for, too.