On 14/10/14 22:56, Steve Litt wrote:
On Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:15:40 +0300 Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> wrote:As far as I understand none of the upstreams are actually requiring systemd itself (or more accurately systemd-logind), but the interfaces it is providing.I fail to see the distinction.
As long as the interface is there (and works), they don't care how it's implemented. The interface is defined, and it certainly *looks* externally reimplementable.
And it also seems to make sense (why should every Desktop Environment implement it's own solution for this?).Because you don't want to inextricably drag a giant monolith into your Desktop Environment just to do a few things.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
The alleged monolith does a bunch of (probably mostly neither interesting nor trivial) stuff for me. That means I don't have to do that stuff myself, and can concentrate on doing the things that are either interesting or trivial.
Besides, the average DE is pretty beefy itself.
And how were they handling this task before systemd?
They were using ConsoleKit, which was orphaned upstream some time after systemd-logind came along.
It's not like Desktops, Window Managers and whatever things like lightdm are called didn't exist before systemd.
(For reference: things like lightdm, xdm, slim, gdm3, etc. are called "display managers", and have been since 1988.)