Re: [gnome-settings-daemon] datetime: Remove datetime D-Bus mechanism

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Thu, 2012-01-19 at 17:49 -0500, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> hi Bastien,
> 
> On Thu, 2012-01-19 at 22:38 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > commit 27fa171efe4179c0a42ec79e0dc501077f042a08
> > Author: Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>
> > Date:   Thu Jan 19 22:33:21 2012 +0000
> > 
> >     datetime: Remove datetime D-Bus mechanism
> >     
> >     Now that gnome-control-center uses systemd's date & time mechanism[1],
> >     we don't need to ship our own mechanism for that purpose. This also
> >     removes the last user of dbus-glib in gnome-settings-daemon [2].

I think systemd is awesome; however, I think you (and others) are being
a bit too cavalier about deleting code.

While it's almost certainly true (looking at the git log) that you are
one of the dominant recent contributors to gnome-settings-daemon, there
are other people involved in GNOME who for one reason or another aren't
going to use systemd, and it's a bit disrespectful to just delete the
code.

>From their perspective, it is a regression - before, they could change
the time.  After, they can't.  And in the picture, we need to clamp down
on these kinds of regressions.  

That doesn't mean we can't ever take a step backwards - for sufficiently
large steps forward.  But in this case we're just shuffling around where
the code for setting time lives.

So concretely - how about bringing back the old code and making it
conditionally compile under a --enable-date-time-backend flag?  If you
want, I can do a patch.

-Colin, with his GNOME release team hat on