I had been emailing Don Armstrong, a DD, about my concerns. One very worrying aspect of that was the choice was either systemd or upstart; there should have been a third option to continue entirely with the status quo of sysvinit -- that third option wasn't a consideration. So we are damned no matter which choice as many don't like upstart either, although I am not sure it is as big a problem as systemd though. When the tech ctte voted, it was 4 for upstart, 4 for systemd and then it was decided by, I believe, the chairman whom chose systemd. Such a huge change as this is should require almost unanimous support .. at least 75% ... otherwise, in my view, the change should not go ahead. If it divides the tech ctte almost 50/50, then there is no doubt it is going to divide the whole Debian community to a great extent. We really must have a DD put forward a GR to get this mess sorted. A.