On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 9:50 PM, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn <chith...@gentoo.org> wrote: > I'd say that Android is an operating system based on Linux. It is not > 'the Linux "stack"'. > I think he was wondering whether the lock-in between dbus, udev and the > Linux kernel will reach proportions where they will be distributed in > one source tree.
Well, I think that all of this is at the heart of the debate. I don't see whether the source trees are merged as being terribly important - the issue is whether the level of integration makes them difficult to peel apart. This is just the vertical integration debate all over again. If you want to use gnome, thou shalt use systemd. If you want to use Chromium, thou shalt use udev, and so on. I can't wait until we hit the point where if you want to use your favorite browser you have to install the maintainer's favorite DE, sysvinit, etc. The only solution I see to getting back to the "unix way" is to agree upon standard APIs, but I think that is many years off. Most of these technologies are very new, and rapidly evolving. Google themselves have shown with platforms like Android that compatibility is not of terrible importance to them beyond the application API (how many times have they broken the camera driver binary interface?), and of course Linux is famous for breaking driver-level binary interfaces, though this is mitigated by the fact that outside of Android almost everybody makes their drivers open-source, or they actually support their drivers for more than six months. The next year or two will be an interesting experiment for the Linux community. Will the "unix way" prevail, or does the future lie in highly integrated tools, that generally do not interoperate, but which provide much greater functionality? Rich
