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

[Olav Vitters <olav@vitters.nl>]

[ Apologies for replying so late

  I am not intending to startup the discussion regarding systemd ]

On Fri, Aug 09, 2013 at 09:36:47AM +0200, Gilles Dartiguelongue wrote:
> For the record we did and still do support setups that upstream does not
> care about.
>  * In the past, we had policykit/polkit optional, we had to stop that
> since it is now too tied in to be decently maintained at our level
>  * We had pulseaudio optional, again, this is now over in some of the
> core components of Gnome, but we do keep it optional were possible
>  * We maintain networkmanager and bluetooth support optional, and this
> has been the case since 3.2 iirc even though upstream flat out refuses
> to merge our perfectly fine patches

Feel free to cc release-team@gnome.org on such patches. I am not saying
something would change, however, Bluetooth is optional in gnome-shell
(though in 3.9.x it crashed if you disabled it). Seems a bit strange to
have it optional in one place, forced in another.

> Keeping systemd optional in Gnome cannot be achieved by the Gentoo Gnome
> team. If someone comes up with a solution to have logind without
> systemd, we will gladly include it but remember that a few devs (4/5
> afaik) already tried and sadly failed.

Intention was not to force systemd. It just seems to have ended up that
way. The various times I asked there has been a lot of work going on
into supporting non-systemd configurations as changes are made. However,
that work is mostly untested and likely buggy (things needs to be used).
I thought the work was good enough (though knew that Debian would go
with requiring systemd as a dependency)

It seems that for Wayland support we somehow do need to require logind
(I forgot why exactly, though I do have IRC logs somewhere). At the
moment that seems unlikely to change. I'm planning to write a proper
message about this to distributor-list.

As development goes on, more and more does indeed depend on systemd.
However, if I look at http://cgit.freedesktop.org/ConsoleKit/log/, most
of the development was made by people involved in GNOME. There are no
recent development for at least 1.5 year. The intention is not to force
things, but seems rather logical the way it ends up.

Most of the development was done within ConsoleKit, now mostly done
within systemd. It would be nice if the logind part was optional like it
was initially, but I don't know if that would still be a no-go for
Gentoo. E.g. does it have to be ConsoleKit, or is a logind also ok? Note
that Ubuntu is going with Qt, so I don't expect them to do much
development on keeping logind separate from systemd.

It seems a bit weird that although work is done to ensure systemd is
optional, in the end just a systemd dependency is taken (Debian,
Gentoo).

  ---> Not trying to start this up again. <---


-- 
Regards,
Olav