Re: Bug#727708: init system other points, and conclusion
On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 20:12:20 Josh Triplett wrote:
> Steve Langasek wrote:
> >On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 09:13:52PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > I think the current Debian GNOME team has a not-undeserved reputation for
> > being obstructionist with respect to bugfixes that require divergence from
> > upstream's stated direction. If the team demonstrated they were open to
> > contributions of the kind you described, volunteers to do the work would
> > not be hard to come by.
>
> That's an impressively high amount of doublespeak packed into a single
> paragraph, particularly the words "bugfixes", "volunteers", and
> "contributions". At a minimum, I think you're overstating the situation
> by refusing to acknowledge that the GNOME team does not consider the
> changes forced upon them to be "bugfixes".
Responding specifically to this:
> You (and other members of the TC) disliked GNOME's requirement of
> NetworkManager, for reasons I still have yet to see explained coherently
> anywhere. You forced the GNOME team to remove it. I certainly hope
> you find "volunteers" willing to do that kind of work increasingly hard
> to come by.
Re: dependency removal -- sort of. The reasoning is explained for the most
part in the tech-ctte decision for #681834. [1] But just to fully make this
clear I'll also provide a brief summary of what I think happened at the time.
network-manager conflicted with wicd; when both were installed and active,
neither worked -- neither could detect this situation, and the resulting error
output was not meaningful. (wicd: "Connection failed: bad password",
N-M: "NetowrkManager is not running. Please start it.") Furthermore the
documentation that came with network-manager did not in any way explain that
this could happen nor what to do about it, nor was there a Breaks: on the
package related to wicd to avoid the conflict. By making network-manager a
requirement via a dependency, anybody that previously had wicd installed would
have their system broken, nor given any clue how to fix it.
There was a strong emphasis from GNOME maintainers that N-M integrates with
GNOME but that alternatives such as wicd do not and thus a strong desire to
have N-M installed; however GNOME does function with Wicd even if there are
certain features that don't work due to lack of integration, and there were a
known number of installation configurations (> 1000) where users of Squeeze
had both wicd and gnome installed.
The maintainer of network-manager discussed that the user could leave
network-manager installed but disable it via running
"update-rc.d network-manager disable" as root -- there was an idea to include
this information within the package's README.Debian file, but that didn't
happen.
In #681834 the decision was to revert the Depends: on network-manager-gnome in
gnome-core. However 10 days later a new dependency was added for
network-manager-gnome within the gnome metapackage, causing a similar
network-manager dependency another way, thus having to go through the
discussion again in #688772. There was some discussion concerning N-M as to
whether it was possible to detect wicd and avoid conflicts with it, but to my
knowledge that was not completed. Near the end of the discussion (which had
mostly stopped) I sent a patch for the Debian Release Notes to try to explain
this situation for users, resulting in [2], which IMHO is not adequate by
itself for mitigating this situation. Discussion fully stopped, and after
some time the tech-ctte bug was closed.
If you're feeling ire for the tech-ctte but have not yet read their decisions,
I would suggest doing so and considering them.
[1]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=681834#273
[2]: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#network-manager-conflicts
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@coredump.us
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