Re: systemd as external dependency

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Wed, 18.05.11 12:16, Brian Cameron (brian cameron oracle com) wrote:

> In my discussions with people at Oracle, there is some concern about
> how interfaces like systemd are being managed.  Interface management is
> something that Sun (and now Oracle) obsesses about, as many of you who
> have heard about our "ARC" process know.  Many people at Oracle ask me
> questions about what is going on, but I myself have trouble following
> the evolution from HAL to systemd or how exactly this impacts GNOME on
> non-Linux systems.  I am still digesting the fact that ConsoleKit is
> going away.  Is there a clear big picture, timeline, or roadmap yet?

My and Kay's plans regarding systemd have been circulated and discussed
widely.

http://lwn.net/Articles/441328/#Comments

I think our approach here is as transparent as it can get. 

> I know that people in the GNOME community understand how important good
> documentation is, but there is probably more that could be done to get
> the systemd message out there in an inviting manner, especially if
> there is a serious interest to get wider, especially non-Linux,
> involvement.

Hey, pick something else to criticize us with, than documentation. I
think systemd is much better there than the majority of open source
projects, and we have been blogging about its features regularly.

http://0pointer.de/public/systemd-man/
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd-for-admins-1.html
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-new-configuration-files

These docs even have been translated to other languages, and there's a
substantial body of other localized documentation available:

http://wiki.opennet.ru/Systemd_%D0%B4%D0%BB%D1%8F_%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/752a690f-8e93-4948-b7a3-c060117e8665/entry/systemd_parte_1

> At the very least, I hope we can design a desktop so that if systemd is
> not present this just disables those parts of the desktop that require
> it.  Not having systemd may disable support for things like removeable
> media, power management, etc.  There should not be a reason why not
> having systemd should prevent GNOME from being used at all.

Yes, this is pretty much in line with what I suggested with the
time/locale/hostname mechanisms, and the g-s interfacing. It's basically
what Solaris has been doing with PulseAudio as well.

> The only thing HAL is currently used for in Solaris is removeable
> media (e.g. USB) support.  Sun Ray client devices do have USB jacks, so
> it would be neat to have better removeable media support for them.
> Sadly, HAL on Solaris today only supports the desktop on the console,
> so there really is not any removeable media support in GNOME for Sun
> Ray users.  We need to rework all this code anyway.  Perhaps it makes
> sense to solve this problem together via systemd?

systemd does not really cover that. That's mostly done in gio now, with
a bit of udisks thrown in, both sitting on top of libudev.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.