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As a Red Hat employee ...As a Red Hat employee ...Posted Oct 25, 2012 9:48 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)Parent article: GNOME and/or systemd
I'm very unhappy about this attitude to other distros and BSD. I write a lot of software, and all of it works wherever possible on all distros, BSD, even Windows. I even keep around a whole stack of virtual machines running other distros so I can routinely test things against them and respond to bug reports. I know there are many others in Red Hat who feel the same way as me.
Rich.
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As a Red Hat employee ... Posted Oct 25, 2012 13:06 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
It's a trade off.
Portability is important, but so is also coming up with clean, simple, and correct solutions. Gnome is NOT going to be able to create a top-notch desktop system while still having to take on the work of supporting a dozen or so conflicting implementations of low-level system services with dramatically different capabilities for platforms that, frankly, nobody really gives a crap about except the developers.
Hell I expect that the majority of *BSD users don't even use BSD as their primary desktop. I expect the same thing for Solaris. The reason for this is that while they are good operating systems they have always been miserable on most desktop/laptop systems. Traditionally you ALWAYS get a massive increase in utility by using OS X or Windows desktop with Solaris/BSD/Linux servers when compared to using any platform alone. So this makes all the sense the in the world and is not a flame or a indictment of any sort.. it's simply reality.
Therefore forcing the Gnome Devs to compromise to support platforms that are always going to be a hopeless basket case when it comes to desktop is not a smart thing to do.
The solution, as I see it, is this:
Fork SystemD. Make a brain-dead version of it called AbortD or something like that. Have it provide the same APIs that SystemD provides for Gnome and Gnome software and just let the functionality not supported or conflicts with 'native' utilities on non-SystemD systems just go fallow. As SystemD grows and changes it will be simple to add functionality to 'AbortD' even if that functionality provides little more then a useless 'warm fuzzy' to software that tries to hook into it.
As a Red Hat employee ... Posted Oct 25, 2012 13:09 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
To put it another way: have 'AbortD' provide the modern equivalent of symlinking systemd to /bin/true
As a Red Hat employee ... Posted Oct 25, 2012 19:28 UTC (Thu) by alvieboy (subscriber, #51617) [Link]
Man, you made me laugh now :)
As a Red Hat employee ... Posted Oct 25, 2012 16:38 UTC (Thu) by cmorgan (guest, #71980) [Link]
Sometimes it takes this kind of change in approach in order to build support behind a solution. Maybe a systemd equivalent as drag suggested, or maybe use a different system that works for your particular OS. Maybe a standard dbus interface that multiple OSes can implement.
Sometimes progress leaves behind those unable or unwilling to change.
As a Red Hat employee ... Posted Oct 25, 2012 17:07 UTC (Thu) by dmm (subscriber, #9815) [Link]
> I know there are many others in Red Hat who feel the same way as me.
Glad to hear that. Unfortunately, for quite some time, I have an impression that RH is intent on bulldozing or swallowing anything not developed at RH. It reflects the reality that this company is by far the biggest in the open source world and thus has enough sources to behave as it does. Another poster below said that "Sometimes progress leaves behind those unable or unwilling to change" which reminds me of some David Byrne's lyrics: "The weak among us will perish/The strong alone will survive/Voices like thunder/Decisions like steel..." We're about to enter a philosophical discussion here, I'm afraid. And I am afraid indeed.
As a Red Hat employee ... Posted Oct 28, 2012 18:27 UTC (Sun) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link] I have an impression that RH is intent on bulldozing or swallowing anything not developed at RHAre you aware that Matthias Clasen and Colin Walters work for Red Hat?
As a Red Hat employee ... Posted Oct 26, 2012 13:49 UTC (Fri) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]
It's relatively easy to be portable to get 60-70% of functionality. But some of the bugs in that last 30% get hard. As I said on the list, things like shutdown/suspend state and login state *are* related, and it makes total sense that systemd has them integrated in logind.
Mentioning Windows makes no sense in the context of GNOME - sure, maybe the libvirt client API or whatever compiles on Windows. That's not too hard, especially once you have a portability layer like we have in GLib that is necessary for GTK+ on Windows.
But the full desktop would be totally insane to even try on Windows; I know KDE tried, but I don't think they got anywhere really. It's hard enough to get everything working and making sense even when we control the full stack. Stuff like the integrated lock/login screen just wouldn't be possible, etc.
As a Red Hat employee ... Posted Oct 26, 2012 14:16 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Well, we never really put any effort in getting the desktop running on Windows. The kde-windows project focuses on getting the applications running. That works quite well, not perfectly, but well enough for real work.
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