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.