One system has, at last count, over 600 provided service bundles in a Debian package. (It's somewhere around 670 in the development version.) These range from "accounting" through "keepalived" and "swift@container-auditor" to "ypbind".
Note, for the sake of completeness, that van Smoorenburg rc scripts changed format on Debian back in 2014. Most of the boilerplate has been eliminated, and writing them is a lot closer to how would would write a Mewburn rc script on FreeBSD/NetBSD or an OpenRC script.
It is fortunate, then, that neither of the ones that I referenced are that. The several run program collections are, as we can see, provided by a range of different people from Wayne Marshall to Glenn Strauss; and van Smoorenburg rc on Debian is maintained by several people, including Petter Reinholdtsen who introduced the aforementioned 2014 change.
No, that's actually impossible. Many/most of the core packages are dependent on systemd - directly or through intermediate dependencies. If that weren't the case - there would be no motivation to fork the distribution.
Part of the arguments that led to the fork was the "viral" nature of systemd use, i.e. it's not just an opt-out option, but more integral than that.
At the same time - breaking the systemd dependency was not extremely involved technically. Very little code had to be written, and most of the work is tying things together at the distribution level.
> Couldn’t you just install Debian, choose sysvinit and uninstall systemd?
Maybe, but Debian policy reserves the right to break your programs in future updates, right?
> Use some even less common init system and have no package provided init scripts/units/what have you.
If you just want to use the most common thing with everything being easily packaged, why would you be using Debian rather than, say, Windows? The things that traditionally set Debian apart from Windows are the same things that set something like Devuan apart from modern Debian, IME.
> Maybe, but Debian policy reserves the right to break your programs in future updates, right?
I'm pretty certain packages wouldn't see a change such as removing sysvinit support files unless you upgrade to a new major version (i.e. upgrade from Buster to Bullseye). In that scenario, sure, all bets are off. But in that scenario you could also just find the package missing too, so no amount of sysvinit scripts will you if the binary itself is gone.
> If you just want to use the most common thing with everything being easily packaged, why would you be using Debian rather than, say, Windows?
Wat? A pretty basic Debian Buster box I setup recently has close to 200 systemd unit files from just 24 Debian packages. Are you seriously suggesting that I should remove systemd, install... some other declarative service manager, and then write/find appropriate unit files for all of those services?
> The things that traditionally set Debian apart from Windows are the same things that set something like Devuan apart from modern Debian, IME.
I'm glad you made sure to classify that as your opinion.
Also, I personally won’t be dropping systemd any time soon because the alternatives on Debian are:
Go back to Sysvinit and have to write sysvinit scripts myself; or
Use some even less common init system and have no package provided init scripts/units/what have you.