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 10:45 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by ovitters
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

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.

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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.