On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 10:13:25PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote: > No, Josselin was making the technical claim that GNOME 3.10 would need a > working logind even for basic functionality. > So if it is possible to get the basic functionality of GNOME 3.10 > without a working logind, his claim is just plain wrong. > And when I was asking him for the technical details that would back up > such a strong claim, he was not able to deliver. > And that does matter a lot, since such claims seem to be the basis > of all these "GNOME in jessie needs systemd" or "with multiple init > systems, GNOME will need a dependency on systemd" (and Josselin even > expects an exception from the release managers for that if the TC > decision would not allow such a dependency [1]). Whether or not it's possible for GNOME in jessie to be made to work without logind, I agree with the GNOME team that logind is a reasonable dependency for GNOME to have on Linux. What is not reasonable is the chain of logic that leads from "GNOME should use logind" to "GNOME will require systemd as the init system". logind v204 (and the other systemd dbus services) have been made to run on non-systemd-PID1 systems. Work is ongoing to provide an alternative implementation of a cgroup single-writer, that can then expose a systemd-compatible interface for use with logind v205. These are not blue-sky hypotheticals; the first exists in Debian unstable already as the systemd-shim package, the second is available as an upstream project (http://cgmanager.linuxcontainers.org/) that will be suitable for use in Debian well before the jessie release. And I have already offered my support to the systemd maintainers to support this configuration going forward. Yet when I challenge the assertion that "desktop N will require systemd, therefore Debian must adopt systemd as PID 1", which has been repeated endlessly in this discussion, I am chided for being insufficiently courteous to people who do not have the facts on their side. I have previously suggested that the GNOME team has a reputation for obstructionism. I owe the GNOME team an apology for this; as was made clear to me, in my efforts to not overly personalize the discussion, I instead erred in the opposite direction by tarring the entire GNOME team with the same brush. I will instead limit my criticism to Josselin, who despite giving the impression of being the spokesman for the GNOME team, is apparently not speaking for the team as he seeks to cloud the issues around the technical choices that face this committee. Assertions that desktops' dependencies on logind dictate the use of systemd as PID1 are at best a self-fulfilling prophecy which creates a climate in which people are dissuaded from even trying to do the work to provide alternatives because they believe these efforts will be blocked by the GNOME team; and at worst, an overt attempt to distort the TC's debate on the init question. Josselin has asserted not only that he considers systemd-as-init a hard dependency for GNOME in jessie, but that he expects the release team to side with him over the Technical Committee if the TC does not agree with him. This is unconscionable, given that there are two very straightforward and obvious technical solutions to this problem: - split the systemd package (as previously discussed) into separate binaries, for the init system vs. the dbus interfaces, and have GNOME depend on the latter - have the systemd package declare one or more virtual packages via Provides:, which GNOME packages depend on and one or more alternative implementations may also provide. It is possible that, at the end of the release cycle, there will be only one viable implementation of these interfaces, and Josselin's prediction will be proven out. However, it is crucially not the place of GNOME maintainers to decide a priori that this *will* be the case, particularly when it should be clear to everyone that there are developers (myself included) interested in doing the work to make these dbus services work on top of other init systems. This is contrary to the spirit of Debian, and contrary to the very principle of "reasonable accomodation" that Russ espoused on this very bug last month. And so I am greatly dismayed by the position Russ and Bdale have taken in this discussion with respect to packages being allowed to depend on a specific init system. Both have expressed the opinion that Debian should remain open to alternative init implementations as long as there are developers willing to do the work; but when it comes to concrete examples of ways in which conflation between init system (that is, service registration and service management) interfaces and dbus service interfaces directly interfere with that goal, they have been unwilling to stand up for the relevant technical principle. This despite the fact that the burden on the GNOME maintainers to support alternate implementations of these dbus services is much lower than the burden of providing sysvinit startup compatibility in jessie for an upstream project that doesn't support it. As Philipp Kern points out in <41b26b373019ab39ebff223603a085d1@hub.kern.lc>, this leaves us with the very real possibility that we will wind up with mutually incompatible sets of packages in the archive for jessie that are no longer coinstallable, not because the packages themselves have conflicting functionality, but because they've taken sides - intentionally or unintentionally - on the init system question. If we don't think such fragmentation of the Debian archive is an acceptable outcome (and I for one don't see any reason it should be), then we should say as much in our resolution. The committee has a duty to provide strong technical guidance to the project, not just to get involved after something has gone off the rails. If we *aren't* going to provide such technical guidance about how we expect multiple init systems to coexist in the archive, then we should not pay lip service to the idea of supporting multiple init systems and should instead explicitly declare that only one init system is supported. Thus, for me, all of the "T" variants in Ian's latest draft (<21226.41292.366504.997315@chiark.greenend.org.uk>) rank below FD. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org \
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