Comment by geofft

This is just not true at all. (I'm a Debian package maintainer; I paid close attention to both the vote itself and the discussion around it.)

Debian uses ranked preference voting. Of the nine committee members, only one ranked sysvinit above either systemd or upstart. The rest were split about which of the two, with systemd winning the tie-break vote, but both were acceptable choices to all eight. There was no tie about whether systemd would have been an acceptable choice; both systemd and upstart were accepted 8-to-1.

The one member who voted in favor of sysvinit resigned after trying to start a general resolution (a vote of the entire project) to overrule the committee, and being told by basically everyone that this was inappropriate. He did not resign over systemd; he resigned, at best, over the process, and really I'd say he resigned because the project had lost confidence in him as someone able to act reasonably in contentious technical situations, which is basically the job of a technical committee member.

Nobody on the technical committee had refused to implement systemd support. The technical committee is not an implementation body anyway, but none of the members have refused to, say, implement systemd support in their packages, and they all remain members of the project.

All of this is public record, e.g.: https://lwn.net/Articles/585504/

(Also, none of what you said is a counterargument to the post you replied to.)