Re: Requiring systemd for the gnome-settings-daemon power plugin

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

David:

On 10/22/12 11:50 AM, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Brian Cameron
> <brian cameron oracle com>  wrote:
> You are talking about shipping a *complete* and *free* (libre *and*
> gratis) graphical desktop environment and you're complaining that you
> have to spend a couple of hours *reviewing* the code and/or turning
> off the features that you *did not* participate in developing because
> you choose to use a different OS than the people who actually *did*
> spend time working on the feature?

I have heard about this "couple of hours".  Is it even possible to
build the GNOME stack in 2 hours if you run into no problems?

> I don't think that's fair at all -
> and I really have to constrain myself to not use stronger language
> here.

I never intended to complain.  I was only saying that I find it not
surprising that things are moving slowly considering the state of
documentation.  That is just my perspective.  If it is necessary to
point the blame at anyone, perhaps the right people to blame are, as
you suggest, the people who are being slow.

That said, I do think the GNOME Foundation does play a role in trying
to ensure that there is good communication and coordination across
distros, so I think it is equally wrong to suggest that the
responsibility of moving forward lies solely in the hands of the
distros.  Are you suggesting that The GNOME Foundation and community
should play no role in making the GNOME 3 transition a success across
distros?

> Instead, may I suggest getting involved early and voicing your concern
> *during development*  so we can either add an abstractions (such as
> e.g. GVolumeMonitor, GDrive, GVolume, GMount) or ifdefs or whatever
> [1] and avoid situations like this?

I have, over the past years, tried several times to discuss issues
surrounding portability.  For example, as GDM maintainer I strongly
recommended against supporting ConsoleKit as a hard dependency in the
first place.   In hindsight, I think adopting and throwing away
ConsoleKit was not the best decisions.  In the situations where I did
voice my concerns during development, I did not get the impression
that my concerns generated much response.

> Surely, the way it needs to work
> in GNOME is that if distributors show up and do portability-work (and
> it's good enough) [2] it will get merged. But it involves actually
> showing up and doing the work and not just sending e-mail.

I have personally done a fair share of porting work over the years.  I
do not just send emails.  Have we not met?

> But please don't expect others to port GNOME to run on your OS.

I was never suggesting that any others do any sort of port for anyone.
I was only highlighting that the lack of documentation makes things
slow.  I am sure that we can improve the situation with some effort.

Many mature products provide docuemntation to help developers make a
transition when there is a new major release.  I think GNOME is weak in
this area.  The fact that GNOME's developer documentation and GUI
building tools are weak is not a new topic.  Last year I remember
people talking about how to catch up with KDE in this regards, for
example.  Unfortunately, I do not think we have yet even accomplished
this more modest target.

Brian