Re: systemd as external dependency

[Michael Biebl <mbiebl gmail com>]

2011/5/18 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".

Isn't that the kind of functionality that was supposed to be provided
in gnome-system-tools and system-tools-backend? What will happen with
g-s-t and s-t-b?
Why is it better to have that functionality in systemd itself instead of g-s-t?


>
> <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).

I second that.
Speaking as a member of the Debian GNOME team, having the independent
parts be compilable on their own would definitely help us:
- While Debian has a systemd package and we hope to have systemd as a
supported alternative for wheezy, sysvinit is still the default.
Having GNOME depend on systemd would definitely complicate things for
us.
-  Debian's has non-Linux ports. Having the non-arch specific parts in
a separate package would mean we can more easily make the GNOME
packages depend on them.

Cheers,
Michael



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