On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 7:09 AM, <k...@aspodata.se> wrote: > > The problem is that an ever increasing amount of programs list systemd > or some of its libs as a depenancy. So it is getting harder and harder > to opt out. > > The situation is similar to the one with udev and variants. Some > programs list udev as a requirement even though there is no requirment > on technical grounds. I.e. X, I can run X perfectly without udev, I > just have to make my own xorg.conf, or I might want to run X with udev > since then it handles multiple keyboards with different layouts > automatically. It's like when buying a car, some prefer automats, some > stick shift. There are pro and cons for both cases. >
I get your frustration. Below is just my personal sense of things, ultimately the entire Council sets policy but this is my sense of the "Gentoo Way" and how I see things being likely to go. On Gentoo at a distro level we're never going to force package maintainers to make any particular package a dependency as long as the software works without it. At the same time we're not going to force maintainers to patch software to eliminate dependencies. We certainly encourage maintainers to do things like this within reason, but we don't require it. In your example, if upstream xorg starts sticking dbus calls to udev/systemd/etc in their code, and it fails to launch if those packages aren't running, then unless somebody patches out that behavior or makes it conditional then udev/systemd would need to be listed as dependencies. It isn't like simply not listing them would fix the issue anyway, it would just cause X to fail to launch for some users. When software just runs without some features without another package installed, then there is no requirement to list it as a dependency (generally speaking). Maybe during the install it might suggest installing some other packages for full functionality. In the end though, if xorg requires systemd as shipped upstream, that is an upstream issue. I realize you'll get a lot less sympathy with many upstream projects than you'll get around here because goals/philosophies differ. And as upstream projects go further down that road, it will in practice become more difficult for a distro like Gentoo to maintain larger and larger patches to alter their behavior. Gentoo as a distro will probably never force a developer to give up, but at some point you're talking about maintaining a fork and not a patch. Now, you can look at eudev and see that there is ultimately no limit on how long that can go on, but it depends on people willing to do the work. Ultimately Gentoo is a place where we all come together to try to support our ability to maintain a diverse configuration space. Still, that diversity largely depends on the interests of those who put in the work to maintain it. And it often comes at a cost of less vertical integration and automation. At a distro level we try to remove barriers to individual contribution, not force individuals to contribute in a manner that we would prefer them to. -- Rich
