Re: [gentoo-dev] Gnome Stabilization 3.6 or 3.8

[Pacho Ramos <pacho@gentoo.org>]

El jue, 08-08-2013 a las 21:40 +0100, Mike Auty escribió:
[...]
> Ok,
> 
> So there's lots of people that don't want systemd.  Can't we group
> together and have some kind of an affect on upstream?  Upstream
> appears to be suffering the same split we found with portage, in that
> the specification that people are working to is in fact the only
> implementation (as least, that's how I read the fact that a separate
> logind which follows the specification will no longer work without
> systemd explicitly?).  We now have paludis, pkgcore and the PMS.  Is
> there some way, we as the Gentoo Foundation, Developers or even just
> Users can form a petition, or an open letter, that might make enough
> impact on the Gnome foundation for them to reconsider their position?
> 
> Perhaps if there were an "init system specification" project, separate
> from systemd, that systemd had to adhere to rather than deciding to
> change the rules at a random version (like 205), then Gnome could
> potentially have other options than just systemd?
> 
> Does anyone know how Gnome is dealing with being run under non-linux
> systems given the new systemd hard dependency?  Is it simply not
> shutting down, etc?  Can we introduce a similar build capability so
> that people can have a "non-full" Gnome installation that still
> includes most of the apps?
> 
> Either way, bickering amongst ourselves won't have any effect,
> fighting against upstream's changes seems similarly futile (they have
> no reason to improve the situation if we're happy to do the extra work
> when things are bad), so the best chance we have is communicating with
> upstream and asking them to reconsider.  That's not guaranteed to
> work, but focusing our efforts on that, rather than lengthy arguments
> about time-intensive Gentoo solutions seems like a better option...
> 
> Mike  5:)

The situation could be summarized as follows:
- Debian/Ubuntu are still trying to make Gnome work with upstart -> that
lead them to make all the tricks that let logind (that is the currently
important part) work without systemd being running UNTIL systemd 205
(due cgroups handling being merged completely inside systemd). This was
implemented on Gentoo by lxnay in systemd-love overlay. The problem is
that any version newer than 204 won't work. I contacted the
Ubuntu/Debian guy that did most of the work there, and he told me that,
for now, will need to stick with 204 for a long time until Ubuntu
"council" (I don't remember how they call it) decides what to do. He
even admitted that would be interesting if they would simply move to
systemd...
- Other desktop oriented distributions have already migrated to systemd,
and then, they won't probably make any effort to make Gnome work in
their old systems (I am talking about Fedora, OpenSuSE, Mageia,
Mandriva, Arch...). The main advantage they had moving to systemd is to
don't need to maintain their own system, and also being able to share
efforts between distributions.
- openBSD is simply supplying the "semibroken" Gnome stuff running with
their setup (without multiseat working, neither power management, gdm
service handling, and any new issues that could rise from logind not
being running)

No idea about Solaris and others.

Anyway, are you sure openRC is better than systemd for desktop systems
(for deserving the effort to keep maintaining consolekit, that is
currently orphan, cgroups stuff and any other things I am probably
forgetting now) ? In that case, if you decide to try to suggest that to
upstream, I would try to contact with Ubuntu/Debian guys, openBSD
maintainer and Solaris one (Brian Cameron I think)