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 18:57 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate by dlang
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

No what they are asking for is that Debian maintainers be forced to support other init's or the software they maintain will be removed after someone files a bug report about the lack of support. It's completely against the Debian constitution and contrary to the principles of the entire project.

Every constitutional grouping of people eventually faces a challenge where a group of constituents eventually tries to get a rule passed through one of the rule making bodies or by direct vote that is directly contrary to the basic rules of the constitution. Not all of them survive this attempt. I fear for Debian when one group of people tries to force another to do something.

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The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 19:06 UTC (Fri) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (5 responses)

Deliberately breaking previously working software in order to force systemd to be installed is contrary to Debian's Social Contract.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 19:10 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

the problem is in evaluating intent

is making Gnome depend on systemd done to force systemd to be installed? because the person doing it didn't realize they did it? or because it's the only way to get something done that they think is more important than running on systems without systemd?

patches and text communications are a horrible way to try and figure out what the intent of the person was, especially if there is any suspicion that they are not being open about their intent

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 28, 2014 6:47 UTC (Fri) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

Isn't the end result more important than someone's intentions?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 19:49 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

s/breaking/changing/

This is really really boring now.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/distributor-list/2012-Jan...

Anyone serious about putting in effort of forking now over the systemd dep that has come up through logind as a replacement for consolekit, could have really made a difference in 2012 when consolekit became a dead project upstream. You so could have made a positive impact for your chosen cause in 2012. Could have really made a difference and made sure consolekit was still a viable upstream project...in 2012.

Back in 2012, there was an expectation that people interested in consolekit, specifically Ubuntu, would be stepping up forking it and maintaining the fork. That anticipated fork didn't actually happen and Ubuntu actually moved to logind. No idea why Ubuntu didn't stick with CK. There's no real discussion on that.

Seems a bit of wasted energy to get mad 2 years later about projects choosing to no longer depend exclusively on an unmaintained codebase, and have moved on to use something that is actively maintained.

Would you like to borrow my time machine and go back to 2012 and fork consolekit when it was a timely option?

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 20:26 UTC (Fri) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (1 responses)

> Would you like to borrow my time machine and go back to 2012 and fork consolekit when it was a timely option?

I think you must be talking about Fedora which is indeed a lost cause.

Debian still has consolekit.

Meanwhile Erik Koegel forked consolekit2 so Debian will not have to continue maintaining FreeDesktop's software.

The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Posted Nov 14, 2014 21:23 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

No my timemachine doesn't run fedora.. it runs android...being from the future and all.

The fact that Debian still has consolekit as a package doesn't change the fact that it has a dead and unmaintained upstream and other maintained projects should be relying on it.

And honestly it doesn't look to be actively maintained as a package in debian either as there are provided patches sitting in the debian bug tracker for years now.

yes indeed consolekit2 is an interesting development. Officially made public in October 2014, commit log suggests work started on it in feb 2014. Either way 2+ years after upstream died to announce the fork. Its existence now does not change the decision making leading up to October prior to it being known to exist. And it too late to make the jesse freeze without special consideration. So it doesn't even really change the situation for maintainers in the jessie release timescale either.

Really too bad it took 2 years for that fork announcement to happen. One has to wonder on the delay there. Like maybe if Debian had announced the intent to switch to systemd earlier, the fork would have happened earlier as well and there wouldn't have been a 2 year delay like this.

I mean seriously the consolekit2 fork was almost too late, even projects being run by maintainers who have previously voiced concern over systemd dependency. For example Lightdm was ready to drop CK support this month because of a lack of a maintained CK codebase.

Ref:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/lightdm/2014-Novemb...

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/lightdm/2014-Novemb...

Once consolekit2 shows up in deb packaging, that will be an interesting discussion.