Bug#727708: Both T and L are wrong, plea for something simpler
On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 12:05:05PM +0100, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
> On 02/06/2014 11:50, Colin Watson wrote:
> > I don't interpret L as meaning that everything must support "all" init
> > systems, certainly not "alike" (indeed the text of that option is
> > explicit that it isn't necessarily alike). Rather, I interpret it as
> > saying that software-outside-init must be flexible enough to cope with
> > that possibility, and degrade sensibly to a lowest common subset of init
> > system features (IOW in practice, needs to keep working if sysvinit is
> > pid 1). Actual support for things beyond that minimum will require
> > people who care about various init systems to step up and implement it.
>
> What does this mean in the concrete example that lead to the ctte bug?
> That is:
>
> Provided logind is only provided by systemd (the current situation). May
> GNOME depend on logind?
This is not quite the current situation. Neither systemd nor
systemd-shim Provides: logind in the sense of the package relationship
field right now, but both could do so. (In practice it looks as though
it ought to be a virtual package name with an API version embedded in
it; this is not a new or controversial technique elsewhere.)
My interpretation of L is that GNOME may depend on logind (or logind-208
or whatever) as long as that dependency is declared such that another
init system can provide it. I appreciate that there is the abstract
question of what happens if no init system other than systemd actually
steps up to do so; in practice I don't think this is a plausible outcome
and so I don't plan to spend mental energy on it.
My interpretation of T is that GNOME may depend directly on systemd or
on related real packages, although it is encouraged to take some
approach more like the above instead.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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