Re: [gentoo-dev] Going against co-maintainer's wishes (ref. bug 412697)

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 4:02 PM, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn
<chithanh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Rich Freeman schrieb:
>>> Yet another stand. No offense but I'm afraid it's quite childish of you.
>>> I don't understand why you're so proud of it. It's a bit like 'Gentoo
>>> will play as I like. If it doesn't, then I will play against Gentoo.
>>> And if that doesn't help, I will resent and slam the door, and then
>>> write to ml about it.'
>>
>> Honestly, if people want to have that attitude they might as well stop
>> maintaining anything that installs a daemon.  As a developer you have
>> NO power to prevent somebody else from co-maintaining, and since those
>> devs who use systemd are likely to want to have units and they're
>> willing to do the work, you can expect somebody to show up and add a
>> unit.
>
> This is why I suggested that in case of uncooperative maintainers and
> upstreams, put the systemd unit in an extra package. Like it is done for
> selinux policies.

In this case the developer adding the unit WAS a maintainer.  Nothing
prevents any dev from adding themself as a maintainer to any package.
My point was just that if people plan to stop maintaining packages
whenever this happens that they'll end up not maintaining many
packages, because it is a trend that will continue.  IMHO it isn't
really important for devs to co-maintain packages to add unit files,
but certainly they can do so. Developers don't own the packages they
maintain.

Splitting unit files into separate packages is just going to make us
look like Debian, with everything with a daemon having 15 packages in
the tree.  Would it make sense to split init.d scripts into a separate
package?

The Council already decided that the appropriate way to handle unit
files was to put them in the package, without a USE flag, and users
could mask them if they didn't want them around.

>
> With x32, I generally refused to apply the patches to x11 maintained packages
> before they had upstream ack first.

x32 generally involved code patches, which involve a lot more risk of
breakage to existing users and in general are a bigger pain since
anytime the underlying source changes you have to re-diff them.  I
could see more of a push for co-maintaining in this case.

Unit files are just files - you stick them in filesdir and in your
ebuild and generally you touch them about as often as you touch init
scripts, which is rare.  If a maintainer does have to touch their init
scripts and it was because a binary was renamed or something, then
they can just ping the systemd team if they want them to update the
units.

In any case, nothing is being appealed here.  Ben basically quit
maintaining a package, which is his right, and the remaining
maintainers are keeping the unit around.  The intent of the systemd
team isn't to get developers to quit, but frankly I don't think we
need to coddle people to the point where threats to quit are a reason
to not add units to packages.  I think Ben is making a mistake, and
frankly if you are trying to resist the systemd takeover then Gentoo
is one of your best options out there so you might as well make sure
the packages you use are well-maintained even if they also work for
systemd users.

Rich