Re: Tentative summary of the amendments
On 24 October 2014 12:35, Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org> wrote:
> In fact, they want to require that if P supports only A (and not A|B)
> that the maintainers of P have to patch P to make it support B. In the
> good old days[tm] it would be the responsibility of the people wanting
> to use B to submit patches to make P work with B (but here I suspect
> many people demanding support for B do not even use P[1]...).
>
> [1] In particular I heard somebody asked if anybody wanted to help
> with this work and from my understanding the response was not
> very enthusiastic... Why patch something you don't use after all?
The root of the problem is coming from upstream not caring about
alternative init systems. To take the logind case as an example - each
of the dependencies from GDM to systemd make perfect sense in
isolation. However, the end result (was) that GDM only worked with
systemd almost by accident. No developer in that chain was compelled
to run this under other init systems.
However these choices heavily impact our users who (for whatever
reasons) want or need to use another init system. Such users are used
to having to write an odd init script for some service - that is an
acceptable extra work for using a non-default init system. However it
is a much harder task to have to implement a new API introduced by
systemd or creating something like systemd-shim. We should not be
pushing such burdens to our users. That is too hard a punishment for
using an alternative init system and also upstream (or maintainer) are
far better positioned to implement some workaround to make the
software work with alternative inits.
How to best formulate a rule that would make sure that happens is a
good discussion to have. I myself prefer a requirement to support
running with *both* default Debian init *and* sysvinit (as the
canonical common shared init system API implementation).
--
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs mailto:aigarius@debian.org
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