Re: [gentoo-dev] Making systemd more accessible to "normal" users

[Tom Wijsman <TomWij@gentoo.org>]

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On Wed, 15 May 2013 17:03:13 +0200
Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On 05/15/2013 03:41 PM, Fabio Erculiani wrote:
> > ... GNOME ...
> 
> And given that the end-plan according to the guys is to kill the
> distributions shall we just close Gentoo now?

Let's not exaggerate things, there are a ton of other DEs out there;
are all of them starting to depend on systemd specific features?

> > 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.
> 
> Is that so incredibly terrible write and maintain 1k loc?

Whether or not it is terrible, it is a time sink; is it worth doing it?

> > 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.
> 
> Science is science, systemd doesn't work with anything but linux,
> Gentoo in theory should care about not-linux.

Indeed, the goal here is solely to make "systemd more accessible"; we
shouldn't pursue it to be the main init system or force it upon users,
unless there are indicators in the future that it became better (eg.
supports BSD, ...) for everyone.

Whether upstreams will force users remains to be a question to me, this
thread indicates a view from the GNOME users side; but that does not
target the wide audience that uses other DEs.

> > Is there anything we can do? Besides "being prepared", I don't
> > think so. Do we control upstreams? No, sorry.
> 
> I'm upstream for some stuff, vlc was already really close to
> force-kill pulseaudio because of some cute problems, the thing got
> otherwise fixed.

Patches are still an option, and if patches become to tedious there
is the possibility to fork in the worst caste; if there aren't either
of those, we probably don't care enough to provide that piece of
software to our users. There's a moment one has to stop caring about
certain broken / incompatible pieces of software and throw them out.

> Freebsd, openbsd and some other operating systems are still there,
> they have their reasons and usually work better in those fields than
> other, I'm sure some people would wish to kill them, not going to
> happen anytime soon.

It's better to be neutral than to pursue something you can't accomplish.

> > So what do we want to do then? Isolate from the rest of the world?
> 
> The world is bigger than that and we were making bridges around, *why*
> severing them because somebody else decided for you?

Indeed, I'd rather embrace than isolate; if something is useful for a
large share of users, isolating us from it won't make anybody happy. 
 
> > (It's not a sarcastic question). I hope that everybody does their
> > own reality check. 
> 
> Did mine, other experienced the hard way what I said many times.
> 
> Gnome doesn't seem a good reason to leave in the cold people that do
> not even care about it.

Used GNOME for months, then with 3.6 - 3.8 it started to break on me;
it didn't work on either OpenRC or systemd. While I was a happy user at
first, recent events made me lose interest in it; I think a discussion
regarding init systems and similar software shouldn't be focused on a
single DE, so I too am not sure why focus is laid on GNOME here...

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D

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