On Sat, 25 May 2013 12:25:03 +0200
Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se> wrote:

> I would actually expect the change to take effect immediately.

Then how would you be able to shutdown / reboot your system in a clean
way? The premise here is that when you boot with an init system you
must shutdown with that same init system, you can't just start one init
system and expect the other init system to cleanly shut down its
services. Therefore implementing this would either be unclean or way to
complex. 

From all the methods discussed doing it on boot sounds the most sane.

> On boot could work, except that it does add more steps (= more
> fragility) to the boot process, which I think everyone wants to avoid.

If it is implemented properly, it really isn't that fragile as you
would think; it doesn't take much input, so there is barely any
implementation and bug fixing needed and it will work everywhere.

Users that manage to break this will often know how to fix, unless we
messed up from the Portage tree; but well, this mostly boils down to a
proper news item and documentation _before_ bringing this out such that
users are at least aware of this crucial boot process change.

Anyhow, users need to be aware anyway for when they ever decide to try
or switch another init system in the future.

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D