Re: Legitimate exercise of our constitutional decision-making processes [Was, Re: Tentative summary of the amendments]
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
If GNOME supported being built without those features, yes, it's fairly
straightforward. I probably overstated it by saying it's trivial, but I
don't think it would be that hard. But that's from the *packaging*
perspective, which is the part of the ecosystem that you were addressing.
GNOME upstream has not chosen to make those features optional, for reasons
of maintainability at their end, so it's not trivial, but not for any
packaging reasons. Rather, it's not trivial because the support for
acceptable degraded operation without that functionality is not available
in the upstream code base so far as I know. (GNOME maintainers should
correct me here if I got the situation wrong.)
I haven’t tested, but I think you can start a GNOME session without
systemd-logind and do some basic things. It’s just that the amount of
functionality that is not available makes it unacceptable. Things like
power management (including being able to suspend or shut down), or
network roaming, are not optional except in special cases. You cannot
ship that and expect users to consider it “working”.
This is mostly about functionality that used to be provided by
ConsoleKit. Note that the primary GNOME component affected, which is
GDM, has fallback code for ConsoleKit at runtime. However, everything
else depends on PolicyKit, which has chosen to only allow one of both at
build time. But this is a choice of fd.o developers, not GNOME ;)
Cheers,
--
Joss
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