Re: Legitimate exercise of our constitutional decision-making processes [Was, Re: Tentative summary of the amendments]
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> 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”.
Ah, okay, so it's not quite as complete as I had thought, but the level of
functionality missing from the non-logind branch is sufficiently huge that
it's not clear that the resulting packages would be considered useful, or
considered GNOME. I think it's fair to call that software that's not been
ported to a non-logind world. The porting effort that we're currently
doing is to port logind to sysvinit, rather than trying to port GNOME to
something other than logind.
I seem to recall some discussion in release-team about the status of GNOME
on kFreeBSD, which should provide a reasonable glimpse into what GNOME
looks like without logind (although it may have even more issues on
kFreeBSD than on Linux without logind since a few other things are also
different).
> 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 ;)
Whoops, sorry, I had forgotten that there are multiple upstreams involved
here who are making various different choices about what's supported.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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