Re: systemd as external dependency

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2011-05-18 at 14:09 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Heya,
> 
> I'd like to propose systemd (GPL2+,
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd) as blessed external
> dependency for GNOME 3.2. 
> 
> Currently the interfacing between GNOME and systemd is minimal. Bastien
> has been implementing a UI for changing the host name via a
> configuration UI in the control center which uses a tiny mechanism
> daemon included in systemd as backend. GLib already exposes
> g_get_user_runtime_dir() which is a frontend for XDG_RUNTIME_DIR whose
> only implementation I know right now is in systemd.
> 
> In the future I expect more interfacing with GNOME however, and I'd thus
> like to see the discussion regarding acceptance as blessed
> dependency started early.
> 
> In the long run I expect the following additional interfaces used by
> GNOME or one of its components:
> 
> - I am working on two more mechanisms generalizing control of the system
>   locale and system clock/timezone for use in the control center and by
>   other UIs.

This should allow us to implement missing portions of the Region and
Language control-center panel, and probably remove the D-Bus helper in
gnome-settings-daemon for date & time.

We're already using the hostnamed interface in the info panel, allowing
changing the machine's "pretty hostname".

<snip>
> Not all Linux distributions currently use systemd. The majority of the
> big and small distributions however has switched by now or is planning
> to switch in their next versions, or at least provides packages in the
> distribution. The one exception is Ubuntu. While I have hopes this will
> be resolved next year, there is no official statement from Ubuntu on
> this. Distributions not interested in systemd which however are looking
> into having some of its features could probably compile systemd but
> remove all but the mechanism daemons.

I would really like to see the helpers compilable on their own, without
systemd itself, so that we don't need to provide fallback mechanisms in
gnome-settings-daemon (for date & time).

Cheers