The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 8:47 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by mathstuf
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

you have a faulty memory

The entire fuss in Debian started because Gnome required systemd.

Since then, there have been patches accepted that eliminate this requirement, but the whole fuss was exactly because DD decided to make a package only work with systemd.

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 9:45 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

but the whole fuss was exactly because DD decided to make a package only work with systemd.

I was under the impression that upstream GNOME was changed to use systemd-logind rather than the obsolete and unmaintained ConsoleKit. It is reasonable for a Debian package maintainer to go along with this, especially given that systemd is the designated default init system on Debian, and that GNOME, while it serves as Debian's default desktop environment, is essentially an optional feature.

The proper way of fixing this is for those people who want GNOME to work without systemd-as-PID-1 to figure out a way to make this work, and that in fact happened even in the absence of a GR. “The whole fuss” is about forcing this work on the original package maintainers, which is against the Debian constitution. (There are people who would like Debian to work on a FreeBSD kernel or the HURD rather than Linux, but they're doing the required work themselves – they don't go for a GR compelling all Debian developers to do extra work to ensure that their packages support those systems, so why should non-systemd init systems be special in that respect?)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 10:28 UTC (Fri) by mchapman (subscriber, #66589) [Link]

> I was under the impression that upstream GNOME was changed to use systemd-logind rather than the obsolete and unmaintained ConsoleKit.

"Changed" is perhaps too strong a word. As I understand it the code to use systemd was *added*. I'm pretty sure the code that uses ConsoleKit still exists in GNOME (or at least most of it). As an example, https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-session/tree/gnome-ses... still exists.

However, I would expect this code to bitrot over time. I suspect none of GNOME's core developers use ConsoleKit any more. Downstream developers (be that end-users or distribution maintainers) could contribute and keep it operational.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 10:33 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (3 responses)

> I was under the impression that upstream GNOME was changed to
> use systemd-logind rather than the obsolete and unmaintained ConsoleKit.

That's not entirely accurate. GNOME was changed to use logind, but it is not a "rather than". ConsoleKit support is *still* there. After using logind, the cgroups change resulted in logind relying on systemd. Due to other changes, not using logind and some related (but way easier) daemons will result in reduced functionality. Too reduced for Debian.

Ian (GR proposer) asserted that changes happen due to "marketing".. urgh.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 10:45 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

Thanks for clarifying that.

This doesn't detract from the fact that basing Debian's version of GNOME on systemd is a reasonable call on the part of Debian's GNOME maintainers given the upstream's policy, and that people who would like GNOME in Debian to work without systemd should be expected to make the requisite changes, not Debian's GNOME maintainers themselves – with Debian's GNOME maintainers being encouraged to take up reasonable-looking and technically sound patches to that effect. Such patches would obviously be expected to contain conspicuous documentation explaining the loss of functionality, if any, incurred when running GNOME on a non-systemd system, to create informed consent on the part of users.

This does not require a GR.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 18:54 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

go back up several posts, the claim was made that systemd was always purely optional.

This is reminding people that this whole debian systemd debase started from the debian gnome developers deciding to make gnome require systemd

I agree that the Gnome developers should be free to do so, but it's only up to them alone if Debian doesn't use Gnome as it's default GUI

If the Gnome DDs want freedom to do anything they want with Gnome, with nobody else questioning them, then the answer is to have a different GUI be the default that takes the rest of the system into account and coordinates with everyone else.

The position of being the default package brings a lot of users, but it also brings limitations on what it's reasonable for the maintainers to do.

using an example from a different field, there's nothing at all wrong with a company becoming a Monopoly by providing better product at lower prices than their competitors, even if the competitors go out of business as a result. It's only a problem when a company that's a Monopoly uses the power of that Monopoly in bad ways.

These ways explicitly include:

1. blocking the entry of new competition.

2. leveraging their Monopoly in one area to force their way into another area.

Back to the topic. Using the position of being the default to force changes elsewhere in the system is a problem. It's a problem if Gnome does it to force systemd into the system, or if systemd uses it's position as the default init to take over other functions (logging, cron, etc)

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 15, 2014 11:00 UTC (Sat) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

Well, being the default desktop environment doesn't really give them that much power, as since that time the default desktop environment in debian must have (only from memory) changed three times.