Bug#727708: init system other points, and conclusion

[Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>]

Le mardi 31 décembre 2013 à 18:31 +0000, Ian Jackson a écrit :
> Ansgar Burchardt writes ("Bug#727708: init system other points, and conclusion"):
> > What about the cgroup management functionality that newer versions of
> > logind require? Should the systemd maintainers also reimplement it in
> > upstart?
> 
> This is a somewhat separate issue, but: I think bundling the single
> cgroup writer into systemd is a very poor design choice.  I think the
> bad consequences of that choice should be borne by the people who made
> it.

By writing this, it strikes me that you must have seriously
misunderstood some fundamental concepts of systemd. The new logind
behavior is unrelated to the “single cgroup writer” matter, because
there is no single cgroup writer as of today. I spent quite some time to
summarize facts on cgroup management at Andreas’ request, and it seems
you haven’t even read them. I find this very rude from a member of the
technical committee to not try to understand the technical issues before
deciding what other people are supposed to do.

Which brings me to the other point: you are not going to decide what
people want to spend their time on. If systemd is selected as the
default, the systemd maintainers are not going to ask Steve to fix their
upgrades problem for them. And if upstart is selected, you will
certainly not ask members of the systemd community - from which Debian
would have just excluded itself - to fix Debian’s problems with not
having systemd.

For an example I know, if having a working GNOME on Linux means a
dependency on systemd, then it will have a dependency on systemd. If the
TC overrules that, like it did the last time one of its members felt
offended by a dependency in a package he doesn’t use, the alternative
will have to be developed and made available by someone. From my
discussions so far with other members of the GNOME team, that someone
will not be a member of that group.

Let’s say that GNOME migrates to systemd user sessions, like what is
planned for GNOME 2.12 (yes, the version we intend to ship in jessie,
ain’t that sweet). You can decide to cripple GNOME with Ubunbu patches
instead, but that won’t be GNOME anymore; just an unbranded Ubuntu
desktop. And you will not ask the people who spend their time providing
a serious, upstream-friendly alternative to that desktop to spend it on
dumping Ubuntu packages in Debian instead.

So unless the TC wants to remove a great number of packages from the
archive, you need to take into account the fact that some voluntary
manpower is required to implement your decision.

Cheers,
-- 
.''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'
  `-