There’s many ways to interpret the last GR. The way I see it is how Joey hoped Debian was: the outcome of the poll shows that we don’t want to do technical decisions by voting. At the beginning of this GR, I was supportive of it, and though it was a good thing to enforce the rule that we care for non-systemd setups. Though I have slowly changed my mind. I still think it was a good idea to see what the community thought after a so long debate. I now think that this final outcome is awesome and couldn’t have been better. Science (and computer science) has never been about voting, otherwise the earth would be flat, without drifting continents.
So my hope is that the Debian project as a whole, will allow itself to do mistakes, iterative trials, errors, and go back on any technical decision if they don’t make sense anymore. When being asked something, it’s ok to reply: “I don’t know”, and it should be ok for the Debian project to have this alternative as one of the possible answers. I’m convince that refusing to take a drastic choice in this point in time was exactly what we needed to do. And my hope is that Joey comes back after he realizes that we’ve all understood and embarrassed his position that science cannot be governed by polls.
For Stretch, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of new alternatives. Maybe uselessd, eudev and others. Maybe I’ll have a bit of time to work on OpenRC Debian integration myself (hum… I’m dreaming here…). Maybe something else. Let’s just wait. We have more than 300 bugs to fix before Jessie can be released. Let’s happilly work on that together, and forget about the init systems for a while…
P.S: Just to be on the safe side: the rotten tomatoes image was not about criticizing the persons who started the poll, who I respect a lot, especially Ian, who I am convinced is trying to do his best for Debian (hug).