On Mon, 08 Jan 2024 at 08:21:08 -0000, Sune Vuorela wrote: > Maybe the question is also a bit .. "it depends". ... > So that users actually likely get a system that works?
I think the fact that we argue about this every few years, with no simple conclusion, is adequate evidence that the answer is "it depends". We're balancing two competing factors: "make the system work by default" implies that *something* needs to be responsible for pulling in required services at least some of the time, while "make the system flexible" implies that we should not be pulling in all of the services all of the time. In some of the distributions we are competing with, the default answer would be "install no services, the user is expected to know what they are doing". I think that would be doing our users a disservice: we cannot expect new users of Linux to "just know" that in practice, to get what a new user would consider to be a working desktop system, they are going to need dbus-daemon (or dbus-broker), Pipewire (or PulseAudio or JACK or something), logind (or elogind), xdg-desktop-portal, an implementation of o.fd.Notifications, an implementation of o.fd.Secrets and so on. Meanwhile, some distributions are more opinionated than Debian, have chosen a distro-wide preferred implementation for each swappable component, and make it quite difficult to exclude those components or swap them for alternatives. We probably don't want to do that either. See also the thread starting at https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/08/msg00278.html and in particular my reply https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/08/msg00291.html, where our choices are "pull in a dependency" or "user configuration changes are not saved". In response to that thread, I proposed a debhelper patch in #934893 to make it possible to break the dependency chain in what I felt would be the least inappropriate place, and that change was wontfix'd. If libraries that pull in services are considered to be a serious problem, one option would be for "the big desktop environments" (GNOME, KDE, etc.) to have Depends or Recommends on a reasonable set of services that users of those environments will typically want, and then drop dependencies on those services from lower down the stack. However, I suspect that the result of that action would be RC bug reports from users who have pieced together their own unique desktop environment from individual components (or just installed the desktop environment without Recommends), installed one leaf application from GNOME or KDE, and found that the application does not work correctly (or at all) without a service that this particular user's customized desktop environment does not depend on. We cannot have a policy that libraries must not depend on the daemons that are sometimes necessary to make them work as designed, but at the same time have a policy that says missing dependencies are a RC bug that maintainers are expected to drop everything to fix immediately. Demanding that maintainers do impossible things will not give us better software, it will just give us burned-out maintainers. smcv
