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

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

David:

On 10/22/12 01:17 PM, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 2:05 PM, Brian Cameron<brian cameron oracle com>  wrote:
> > Right.  So, you probably are not surprised that things are moving along
> > slowly either.  :)
>
> Actually I'm quite excited about the development pace for GNOME
> nowadays - there are lots of cool *user-visible* features landing in
> new releases.   The fact that it's hard for some OSes to keep up is an
> interesting indicator that the focus in GNOME is more on features than
> (boring [1]) abstraction / portability work. I'm not saying that's
> 100% right - in fact, my previous mails calls for help in that area -
> but as an end-user, I'm pretty excited about GNOME. I would definitely
> not characterize it as "moving along slowly".

I agree that the GNOME development pace is exciting.  I was talking
more about porting efforts moving along slowly.  Though I am not sure
that either one really needs to be fully at the expense of the other.

> As a developer (and working for an OS vendor), I *do* want more OS
> vendors to step up and intensify their participation in the project.
> Yes, more participation from several different OS vendors might slow
> down feature development a bit (for example, landing a *simple*
> library-based abstraction for systemd's logind mechanism), but at the
> end of the day, it's probably going to be a win for everyone.

While the current pace might be good enough, if a little more planning
could avoid so much interface churn where interfaces are developed than
soon thrown away, then that planning would actually speed up development
rather than slow it down.  I do not think the GNOME community has yet
found the sweet spot here, though others may disagree.

When an upstream FOSS community re-invents the wheel too much, it is
tiring and encourages a more wait-and-see attitude, and actually
discourages healthier cross-distro participation.  Whether this is a
good or bad thing is probably hard to say without more hindsight.

Brian