Re: Legitimate exercise of our constitutional decision-making processes
[Disclaimer: I am not a debian developer myself and probably do not have
the right to vote here, I am however a long time contributor and
maintainer in GNOME who has been watching this thread and I feel I have
a responsibility to add to this conversation ]
On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 16:41 -0500, Nikolaus Rath wrote:
> Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> > In the battle between those upstreams and Debian contributors who want
> > everyone to use systemd, and those developers and users who don't want
> > to use systemd, _someone_ is going to experience duress.
>
> I don't think that there are developers and users who want everyone to
> use systemd (trolls excluded). There are just users and developers who
> do not want to do the extra work that would be required to keep their
> systems working without systemd, because that work should really be done
> by the users and developers who don't want to use systemd.
I think you've touched on the matter on which I have an opinion
elegantly and directly right here. And I agree with what you say for the
most part, except for the part where users and developers who do not
want to use systemd should be going out of their way to implement
alternatives for GNOME to run without systemd, this does not reflect the
high standard of quality we've come to expect in general from FOSS
communities.
So what is the situation we have on the GNOME side ? From my perspective
it's simple, we have highly skilled professionals working on two
separate projects, the gnome-shell and systemd, let's not get personal,
someone has to foot the bill for all the work here right ?
So if RedHat wanted to invest in their new vision of the Desktop
Environment, they should not have to pay for the extra work it should
take for those projects to be embraced by the larger FOSS community, and
that's completely fine and their prerogative, in any case, they have
their means of distribution (rpms, fedora, etc).
However, I do fear for the direction that GNOME in general is taking,
I am personally invested in GNOME and I believe that we need to hold
ourselves to a higher standard of quality than the "GNOME and nothing
else" attitude that seems to have evolved in the name of progress.
So while I cannot blame those who are funding this largely experimental
leap into the future for drawing the line somewhere in their budget, I
do expect long time stable distributions such as Debian to draw the line
as to what they accept as stable. If the developers of gnome-shell and
systemd want to participate in the larger FOSS community and have a
venue in Debian, they should certainly be the ones doing the work to
ensure the system meets some minimal expectations of interoperability.
I am afraid that by making systemd (a project in it's relative infancy
performing critical OS tasks), the default init system in Debian just
because the maintainers of gnome-shell/gdm can't be bothered to operate
on anything else, you (the Debian community) are sending a dangerous
message that it's just fine for said GNOME maintainers to lower their
standards of excellence. I fear that with this message things will not
be improving.
Yes, my motivations are self-centered, I think that the quality of the
software produced in GNOME is at risk when external projects who use
GNOME start to tolerate a nonchalant attitude towards stability and
interoperability.
For these reasons, I would (if I could) cast a vote in favor of Ian's
GR, because I feel that GNOME should be doing better and I am afraid
that there will be an increased lack of motivation to do so if the GR
does not pass.
Best Regards,
-Tristan
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