Re: systemd as external dependency

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 1:16 PM, 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?

I think it's pretty simple; from the perspective of GNOME application
authors, these external dependencies are unstable, and may go away or
change.  In fact, application authors should really know that anything
outside GTK+ and its dependencies may go away in change.

(In reality, the only stable points in the Linux FOSS ecosystem are
the system call interface, glibc, the X server, and GTK+).

> 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, that's the same as what I said - this is GNOME in the "plain old
Unix X head" case.