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

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Hello Antoine,

On Fri, 2012-10-19 at 11:14 +0200, Antoine Jacoutot wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 11:00:05AM +0200, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I intend on making systemd a hard requirement for the power plugin in
> > gnome-settings-daemon. There is a lot of interactions and external
> > factors involved in making policy decision about power. This makes the
> > power plugin one of the more fragile parts of the system, with things
> > like DPMS, screensaver activation, screen locking, brightness control,
> > suspend policy, battery information exporting, all handled in the same
> > codebase.
> > 
> > Using systemd to request suspends means that:
> > - things work out of the box when people do not use GNOME (no need to
> > install acpid which then conflicts with GNOME)
> > - inhibitions are per-system instead of per-user
> > - application get more information about suspending
> > - simplify the power plugin's codebase a great deal
> > 
> > The patches I will commit are here:
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680689
> > 
> > Additionally, and separately, support for ConsoleKit usage for
> > session-tracking will be removed.
> 
> 
> I think at one point the GNOME project will need to step up and
> explicitely states that GNOME is a Linux-only Desktop.

GNOME is a desktop that requires interfaces that only exist on Linux so
far. It's where most of the development is done, and it's also where
most the majority of users are.

> I am a BSD user; don't get me wrong, if GNOME goes Linux-only then so
> be it. But the current situation is hard for us because it is unclear
> where all of this is going.
> When systemd was first mentionned on the lists, it was said it
> wouldn't be a hard requirement. Fair enough, we are "only" talking
> about the power plugin here but the way it is going systemd will soon
> be needed for more important features.
> I'm just wondering if it is still worth trying to maintain GNOME for !
> linux platforms (like I do on OpenBSD). Implementing some of what
> systemd provides is far from trivial for us.
> 
> To summarize, it'd be nice to know whether there is still a chance to
> see GNOME running on BSD in a near future. If everything is going
> systemd, then the answer is clear, but for now I lack the information.

If the logind D-Bus interfaces for inhibition[1] and session tracking[2]
are implemented then gnome-settings-daemon will work on OpenBSD or other
operating systems.

There might be, or there will be, more changes, I would expect, that
will make running GNOME on non-Linux require more work (all the work on
application sandboxing[3] for example).

Whether you choose to carry on the work is really up to the communities
in question, and you. I hope you will, but as a maintainer, I cannot
carry supporting a myriad of options and infrastructures.

Cheers

[1]: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/inhibit
[2]: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/logind
[3]: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Sandboxing