Re: systemd as external dependency

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2011-05-20 at 23:12 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le vendredi 20 mai 2011 à 10:37 -0400, Shaun McCance a écrit :
> > I think Evandro's proposal is fair as well. We could set up a
> > wiki page listing D-Bus interfaces we expect to be available.
> > And not just for systemd-related things. Don't like PackageKit?
> > Fine, whatever, but we expect you to make your stuff implement
> > this interface.
> 
> PackageKit is a good example of why this is not always a great idea. If
> you design an interface based on a given system, you might make
> assumptions that make it hard to adapt to other systems. 
> 
> I don’t think this approach is bad per se, but it requires extra care
> while designing the interfaces, and checking how they would be ported to
> other OSes, even without actually doing the job.

You don't mention specific problems. I assume you mean the issues
with user interactions when installing:

http://www.packagekit.org/pk-faq.html#user-interaction

I don't believe this is a case of developers not having researched
what different systems do. Rather, I think it's a case of making a
conscious design decision about how we think users should interact
with computers running GNOME.

Understand that GNOME 3 is design-focused: We create a coherent
design for users, then we figure out what technology we need to
make that design happen. Some people seem to want to go the other
direction: See what technology we have, and figure out what kind
of design we can bolt on top of it.

I think it is absolutely fair to ask GNOME developers to document
what they expect of the system to achieve their designs. I do not
think it's fair to ask them to compromise their designs because
some technology stack behaves differently.

--
Shaun