Re: Technical committee acting in gross violation of the Debian constitution

["Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult" <enrico.weigelt@gr13.net>]

On 27.11.2014 00:29, Noel Torres wrote:

> manpower required to maintain a distribution with more than one init
> system widey installed, manpower to perform the required changes to
> support multiple init systems in Jessie, centered about the most
> important question: our users.

Just curious: how large actually is the overhead for that ?

For most packages, that IMHO should be just still writing/updating init
scripts parallel to systemd service descriptors. I haven't had the time
for a deeper analysis (systemd specifications aren't entirely precise
and complete ;-o), but maybe we could even generate them from an common
primary source, at least for a large portion of the cases.

But there are other cases like GNOME (and IIRC KDE), which now seem
to rely on systemd. I haven't done a deeper analysis what's exactly the
big deal about it, and why we now need a new init system (or parts of
it) for that. The most common argument I've heared from systemd folks is
the multi-seat issue.

Well, I'm maybe a bit old-fashioned, such setups aren't anything but
new to me (actually, done that 20 years ago), and I wonder what that
all has to do with the init system. The primary aspect here is a proper
Xserver configuration. We'll always have to support various unusual
setups, like multi-screen composition, multiple input devices, etc,
so just having multiple Xservers on separate screens seems a rather
simple sub-case. An hardcoded magic like systemd-logind does  (eg. it
generates it's own xserver configs on the fly) sounds like a pretty
bad idea to me. It might be working for a large number of users, but
also limits the whole stack to those rather simple scenarios.

The big question I'd ask the systemd and gnome folks is:

Why do these things all have to be so deeply interdependent ?
I would even question, why each DE needs it own display manager ?
What's so wrong with all the other DMs ?

Certain DEs (like GNOME and KDE) seem trying to build their own
operating system - I really fail to understand why.


cu
--
Enrico Weigelt,
metux IT consulting
+49-151-27565287