systemd effectively mandatory now due to GNOME

To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

Subject: systemd effectively mandatory now due to GNOME

From: Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo@scientia.net>

Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 22:30:41 +0200

Message-id: <[🔎] 1382560241.6924.6.camel@heisenberg.scientia.net>

Hi. Well I hope this doesn't turn into some kind of flame war... about systemd, GNOME or similar. In sid, gnome-settings-daemon depends now on systemd. I wouldn't have any issues with that, but at least right now systemd is for me not yet production ready (it seems to miss proper dm-crypt integration - or at least all those use cases where dm-crypt makes sense at all). Of course I can install the package but don't have to switch init= to it, nevertheless it seems that already this alone adds several things (udev rules, dbus stuff and some things in the maintainer scripts) that *will* get enabled. I've opened #726675, asking the GNOME developers what they think about this, but the only answer so far is basically "GNOME now depends on systemd". I personally think this is a design problem of GNOME upstream and we have previously seen that GNOME upstream forces their "blessings" upon their users - anyway... probably not something we can change from Debian side. So I guess the question is mainly,... what's the policy from Debian side now with such cases? And does anyone know whether it causes "hurt" to just install the package without using it? Thanks, Chris.