Bug#727708: On diversity

[Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>]

Le lundi 20 janvier 2014 à 01:17 +1000, Anthony Towns a écrit :
>  c) logind or an equivalent service implementing the freedesktop.org
> systemd/logind api should be available under all supported init
> systems and architectures in Debian. It should be provided via a
> virtual package "fdo-logind" and packages (such as desktop managers)
> expecting logind to be available should Depend on fdo-logind

I think this is the right approach for logind. This way, the only
implementation would be systemd as PID1, but if the proponents of
alternative init systems actually wrote another implementation, it would
be available.

The one thing that is not handled this way is versioning, because later
versions of GNOME could require newer APIs.


I also have to insist that GNOME 3.10+ *needs* a working logind even for
basic functionality, and that starting with v205, logind *needs* systemd
as PID 1. You might disagree with the implementation details that lead
to this situation, but you should not expect either of these facts to
change before jessie.

This is why the idea to fully support more than one init system is never
going to hold.
      * Either we upgrade systemd to a recent version and have (at
        least) GNOME depend on systemd as PID 1.
      * Either we keep systemd at version 204, we don’t use it as PID 1
        (because it would be madness to be so lagging in versions), we
        find people willing to do long-term maintenance on the
        components we use (probably Canonical), and we have this
        discussion again for the next release when the reverse
        dependencies require newer versions of systemd.
      * Either we remove systemd from Debian with all its reverse
        dependencies (including at least GNOME).

Currently I have no idea of how (and by whom) any other option than
those three would be implemented, making any decision stating otherwise
untenable.

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