Re: Tentative summary of the amendments
Hi,
Aigars Mahinovs <aigarius@gmail.com> writes:
> 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.
Nobody stops people from submitting patches... But nobody seems to be
willing to do so -- presumably because nobody using the software is
interested enough to do so.
> 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.
But instead we should take away packages that depend on a features only
provided by a specific init system (for whatever reason)? Do you think
we serve users better by taking away options from them?
So, if P has a hard dependency on systemd-as-pid1, why do you want to
take P away from me? Because people not liking systemd are more
important than people not caring about it or even being okay with it?
I don't like some software too, but am sometimes required to use it
without an alternative. Can I demand that I can use packages without
said software? Like demanding libraries having to provide language
bindings for at least two languages so I don't have to use PHP[1]? :)
Ansgar
[1] Please don't take offense for this example.
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