14 DAY TRIAL // Immediately after the release of the systemd 229 init system on February 11, Canonical's Martin Pitt announced earlier that he uploaded the new systemd version to the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Debian Testing repositories.
Martin Pitt is the person responsible for the maintenance of systemd in Ubuntu, and during the last several months, he has worked very hard to reduce most of the old technical debt in the Ubuntu Linux operating system.
As a consequence, he has managed to reduce the delta with Debian from a full page of changelog to just one patch, a hack that promises to support system-image despite its strange /etc, as well as a few upgrade fixes that will land after the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Now, the most interesting part of Mr. Pitt's Google+ message is the fact that the systemd packages might be fully in sync with the Debian ones and system-image replaced by building the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on top of Snappy, which should happen before the next LTS release in 2018.
"In the long run, system-image will be replaced by building Ubuntu Touch on top of Snappy, so there's some hope that we can get fully in sync and without Ubuntu specific patches by 18.04," said Martin Pitt, Canonical Foundations Team.
If Martin Pitt and his team of skillful developers manage to fully sync the systemd with upstream, without the need for hacks and workarounds, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will become the greatest release ever made.
Update: It seems that our initial headline was misinterpreted. Martin Pitt talked exclusively about the systemd packages being fully in sync with Debian, not the entire system (which is something everyone has hoped for).