Re: systemd as external dependency

From: William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>

To: Josselin Mouette <joss debian org>

Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org

Subject: Re: systemd as external dependency

Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 10:40:25 -0400

Hi, On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Josselin Mouette <joss debian org> wrote: > Le mercredi 18 mai 2011 à 14:09 +0200, Lennart Poettering a écrit : >> systemd itself has very minimal external dependencies. You need Linux, >> udev, D-Bus, and that's it. (there are a couple of additional optional >> deps however). > > I don’t have anything against requiring systemd, since it is definitely > the best init system out there currently, but the Linux dependency is an > absolute no-no for us. Having optional Linux-only functionalities is OK; > requiring Linux is not. For Debian perhaps. However, I don't think this is true for GNOME. The future of GNOME is as a Linux based OS. It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels, user space subsystem combinations, and core libraries. That said, there may be value in defining an application development platform or SDK that exposes higher level, more consistent, and coherent API. But that is a separate issue from how we write core GNOME components like the System Settings. It is free software and people are free to port GNOME to any other architecture or try to exchange kernels or whatever. But that is silly for us to worry about. Kernels just aren't that interesting. Linux isn't an OS. Now it is our job to try to build one - finally. Let's do it. I think the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly. Jon