X-Windows on PPC in Debian SID

[Stan Johnson <userm57@yahoo.com>]

Hello,

I have a PowerMac G4 MDD (two 1.25 GHz CPUs, 2 GiB memory) that has been
running Debian SID for years. It was last updated on 15 Oct 2023, with
no problems. Yesterday, the update failed. Specifically, "apt-get
update" worked, "apt-get upgrade" worked, and "apt-get dist-upgrade"
worked but deleted ~500 MB of X Windows packages, including Xorg, wdm,
etc. So the system currently is text-only in Debian SID.

This system is using sysvinit instead of systemd, and perhaps that's the
problem? I noticed when I tried to reinstall wdm, apt wanted to remove
sysvinit and presumably use systemd as the init program.

I realize that systemd is Debian's default init system, and perhaps
X-Windows was always destined to eventually require systemd in Debian.
If that's what has happened, please let me know.

thanks for any information

-Stan Johnson