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

[Mike Auty <ikelos@gentoo.org>]

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On 09/08/13 00:19, Greg KH wrote:
> Become upstream developers and create fixes to remove the
> dependancy either by working on openrc features to emulate the same
> things that systemd has that GNOME requires, or split things out of
> GNOME so that it does not require systemd dependencies.
> 
> But to complain to upstream without providing patches is a bit
> futile, don't you think?  That's not how open source projects work,
> we all know that.
> 
> greg k-h
> 

I would like to think that open source developers working on such a
large and integral project might listen to their users.  The way open
source is supposed to work is that people write something, and if it's
good people use it, and if it's not they don't.

I would very much like to have seen systemd succeed, but based on its
own merits, whereas it seems to have been accepted by being championed
at certain distributions, made indispensable to desktop environments
like Gnome, and by dropping the responsibility of developing udev in
favour of developing systemd.

I have heard the systemd developers say that no one has been forced to
use systemd, and that in the open source world, if I don't like
something I can write something different.  That's a wholly selfish
perspective, each and every person that contributes to open source
does so in their own way, and we're entirely dependent upon each other
to make the community and choices as vibrant as they are.  I could be
a KDE developer, or a Gentoo documenter, or work on mplayer.  All
those people are open source contributors and necessary ones, but that
doesn't mean that any of them necessarily has the skills or the time
to look after udev.  Does that invalidate their opinion on the choices
of upstream project they rely on?

There are certain key projects (like the kernel, glibc and udev) which
nearly every system has come to rely upon and, I believe, with that
reliance comes responsibility.  I wouldn't expect Linus to just one
day and walk away to go developing a new kernel he thought was better,
but he could.  If he did though, I would expect him to leave
infrastructure in place behind him to look after the project he made
which people all over the world now depend upon, and I'd continue
using that until his new kernel had proved its worth.  I certainly
wouldn't expect him to use his natural monopoly to force his new idea
on everyone!

I'm not trying to hinder advancement, the trying out of new ideas is
what open source is all about.  We've got source-based distributions
because someone wanted to see if it would work, it did and there's a
good community around it.  However, that hasn't come at the cost of
binary distributions, they both co-exist peacefully and people use
whichever one they want.

I don't have the skills to make a difference, so all I can do is vote
with my feet.  Even after sticking with Gnome 3 through its early
phases, I don't think I can continue using it at this point and I am
investigating alternatives, one of which is to try to remind the Gnome
developers, if not the systemd ones, of why UNIX succeeded even with
such a distributed development base; it was not because of enforced
uniformity...

Mike  5:\
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