On 05/15/2013 08:41 AM, Fabio Erculiani wrote: > Are we realizing that in order to keep systemd out of our way, we're > currently writing and maintaining drop-in replacements for the > features that systemd is already providing in an actively maintained > state? openrc-settingsd was the first thing that we as Gentoo > developers (Pacho?) had to write in order to merge GNOME 3.6 into our > tree. > > And now that GNOME 3.8 is out, the game starts over again: logind is a > hard requirement, logind is part of systemd, starting logind (which > replaces consolekit) is not that trivial as you may think (and is the > thing I started to work on anyway). > > And if this wasn't enough, it means that if you want GNOME 3.8, you > need to get logind, which may or not may get included in our udev > ebuild and if it won't, it means that you will be forced to use > systemd as device manager if you want GNOME 3.8, which is believe it > or not, the thing that Ubuntu did. > > The problem will only increase in size as the clock moves. > > And (and!) how does all this fit together with eudev? If the idea is > to either put logind in udev (thus, not creating a separate logind > ebuild), it means that eudev is already a dead end for GNOME users, > unless the eudev team is going to provide logind as well. > > I don't want to start a flamewar here, I was the one who called > Lennart software lennartware, but science is science, and a reality > check had to be done: at some near point in the future, our users will > be forced to replace udev/eudev with systemd. Like it. Or not. > > While I successfully use both openrc and systemd, I _do_ think that > (and expect to see) more and more users (and developers) will be > switching to systemd. > Is there anything we can do? Besides "being prepared", I don't think so. > Do we control upstreams? No, sorry. > > So what do we want to do then? Isolate from the rest of the world? > (It's not a sarcastic question). I hope that everybody does their own > reality check. >
The solution is to pressure upstreams not to depend on a specific init system in order to function. How many pieces of software depend on SysV, runit, openrc, or upstart? The only ones I can think of are the pieces that are designed specifically for making those init systems easier to administer, not user-facing software like desktop environments. I sincerely believe that each user and distro reserves the right to choose which software to boot the system with, and desktop environments and other user-facing software should not care about which init system it's running on. In the case of GNOME, I think they're going too far by depending on these things. GNOME devs haven't cared much for user responses (especially wrt GTK+ 3.x), so they are likely to continue integration with systemd. They're free to, but we're free to not use it, too. Personally, I will not have systemd on my box(es). I don't agree with its motives, its methods, or its design. I will not use software that depends on it. If the situation gets bad enough, then I may be forced to switch to another OS... that bothers me, to a degree, but as long as it's on my hardware, I have a say. It would not bother me if distros ostracized Lennart and his projects from the free software world, as he approaches free software with a toxic attitude. We wouldn't miss much IMO. As for Gentoo itself, I'm happy as long as choice remains the governing principle.
