hard systemd dependency?

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

hi,

I'd open a bug for this but it's going to turn into an annoying 
metadiscussion in any case, so let's just start here.

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/?id=a1ab95fae75dd61fd50165b4d8a08b5588245273

As of that commit, gnome-settings-daemon has a hard hard[sic] dependency 
on systemd.  Before that, at least you could jhbuild GNOME on Ubuntu or 
non-Linux platforms.  There was even some hope that GNOME would be fully 
functional on those platforms if they implemented the proper D-Bus 
interfaces.

I don't really care one way or another if systemd is a hard dependency 
of GNOME or not.  I'd actually sort of prefer that it was, so that we 
could stop wasting time on maintaining crusty code and (perhaps more 
importantly) stop having these discussions.

It seems like this is the sort of thing that should be discussed before 
just doing it, though.  I don't really agree with the justification in 
the commit message that this "doesn't really add any new dependencies" 
because the effect is quite real: it's currently not possible to jhbuild 
GNOME on Ubuntu[1].

This is particularly worrying in light of the discussion we had at 
Boston Summit where we decided that keeping jhbuild working on Ubuntu 
would be one of our goals...

Anyway... if we are really entering into a strong systemd-only world 
(and not merely communication with standard systemd D-Bus interfaces) 
then I'd prefer if we did that with an explicit declaration by the 
release team and not a commit with a misleading log message made by a 
single maintainer.

Cheers



[1] Those who want to try jhbuilding GNOME on Ubuntu can always get the 
libsystemd-login-dev packages from Debian and install them on their 
system.  jhbuild will be successful but you'll be left with a PolicyKit 
compiled against systemd and, as a result, a gnome-shell that aborts on 
login: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687556