Re: gnome-user-share / g-s-d will require systemd --user in 3.22

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2016-09-05 at 14:19 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
<snip>
> I'm a downstream as well (Debian), which was caught by this change.
> Note this particular change was merged after the official beta
> release
> and is only in Git atm, but it's targetted for 3.22.
> Personally I'm a bit concerned that such a far reaching change was
> slipped in *after* the beta release.

It was announced, and I requested comments about this, on May 12th 2016
in the "upcoming "systemd --user" dependency in gnome-settings-daemon"
thread on desktop-devel-list.

Other projects, GUADEC, holidays and sickness got in the way of me
merging this code before, but has it had already been discussed and
elicited few comments.

<snip>
> systemd --user is much more involved. Providing a replacement for
> that
> is imho, not easily possible.

The horse has bolted on this one. gnome-settings-daemon's Sharing
plugin required a better way to keep track of the daemons it launched,
and using systemd --user as a baby-sitter process means that we don't
lose track of already launched daemons when gnome-settings-daemon
crashes, and reap them properly even when said g-s-d is abruptly closed
without cleanups.

Note that there are also plans to switch gnome-settings-daemon to be
mini-D-Bus services, which are likely going to be started through
"systemd --user", in the next development cycle.

Given that the Sharing plugin's functionality already required
NetworkManager, that NetworkManager is only available on Linux, and
that systemd is the de-facto init system for Linux OSes, this means we
only dropped support for non-systemd init systems. I'm fine with the
loss of support for non-systemd init systems, if it means more reliable
functionality (which has impacts on privacy and security).

Cheers