The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

It seems to me the only problem you have really consolekit. And consolekit is a bit of a weird duck because its been a dead upstream now for like 2 years. Do you really expect applications to continue to hold onto support for an unmaintained framework element like CK?

If the planned upstream maintainer transition that was suppose to happen in 2012 had actually happened as planned and CK was still actively maintained upstream, I very much doubt people would be dropping consolekit support in the last year or so.

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

I have no idea why the new maintainer ended not doing the expected fork/rename. The selected maintainer basically was radio silent as far as I can tell and Canonical/Ubuntu seemed to have quickly lost interest in CK completely.
Even before the handover LP expected CK to work side-by-side with logind as long as someone stepped up and became the maintainer.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/consolekit/2011-May...

Systemd did plan for compat with consolekit and handed CK over to someone else who was interested in keeping CK viable. Someone dropped the ball with CK as soon as they were given it.

So its been 2+ years since that CK codebase was dead upstream and people are only picking it back up maintainership for it now with consolekit2 opening up. Even lightdm was going to drop consolekit support until they were told about consolekit2 just this month! Do you really expect applications to hold on to support indefinitely for a codebase that is dead upstream for 2+ years? C'mon.

Honestly I don't really know what more you expected from the systemd side of things. The idea for logind was communicated early to pretty much all the CK stakeholders, and CK maintainership was gracefully handed off to someone in Ubuntu still interested in doing the work to maintain it with the expectation that CK would be renamed and continue on as an API to target. And CK upstream development basically just died from lack of maintainership interest from the new maintainer. Other developers higher up the stack ending up making the prudent choice to drop support for the bitrotting CK instead of carrying it around pointlessly.

-jef