Rich Freeman posted on Wed, 15 May 2013 10:01:57 -0400 as excerpted: > Gentoo is about choice, but that doesn't mean that every developer has > to support every possible choice on every package.
++ > Eudev not working with gnome is not a reason to hold back either > project. Not every option in Gentoo has to be compatible with every > other option. And in fact, that's already the case. > Eudev is welcome to stay even if its developers are its only users. ++ > I do agree in general that systemd seems pretty likely to take over, but > that doesn't mean that those who aren't running big desktop environments > can't make use of the alternatives, or that providing alternatives is > bad. I doubt you'll ever get Gnome 3.8 running on Prefix either. :) FWIW, of "the big two", gnome and kde seem to be going in totally opposite directions here. Gnome, in accord with their "there can be only one true way" tendencies, seems to be hell-bent on requiring systemd, which of course then pretty well eliminates gnome on other than Linux as well. Kde, OTOH, appears to be going totally opposite, more modular both with kde itself and with qt, thru the remaining gen-4 period and into gen-5 (qt5/kde5/kde-frameworks). Much of kde is even running on MS these days, and it appears they plan on continuing both their BSD support and expanding the MS presence and support, as they go more modular for kde frameworks and individual app devs consider it appropriate. As such, they're hard-rejecting a kde-wide hard-dep on systemd. Instead, while individual systemd management components, etc, will likely require it (which makes sense given that's what they're /for, kde's grub management module makes little sense without grub, after all), everything else will work with it if it's there, or with other existing system services if they are there instead. The same thing appears to be happening in kde for X and wayland. Wayland support is definitely planned, with an early tech-preview release set for this summer I'm told, but AFAIK there's no plans to drop X support at least thru gen-5, kde5/frameworks, and qt5 is of course already supporting X, wayland and MS Windows (among others), with its multiplatform support being a primary feature point so qt isn't likely to dump that or it would simply no longer be qt as we know it. Which leaves kde well positioned thru at least gen-5 to continue working and even expanding on all current platforms as well as chosen new ones. (FWIW, there are no plans at this point to support mir, however, as confirmed in a recent blog post.) So while it's likely that over time it'll become more and more difficult to support gnome on anything but systemd-running Linux, with that an official upstream requirement, kde's going exactly the opposite direction, and plans on continuing to support and even expand its support both for the bsds and on ms, as well as continuing X support and adding wayland as it matures. As such, they CANNOT hard-require systemd, and AFAIK aren't even planning on doing so on Linux, tho obviously kde does plan on supporting systemd for the distributions that run it. So of the traditional big-two DEs, gnome would appear to be the only one with an announced hard-requirement of systemd. I don't know what the "lighter" and traditionally anyway less popular gtk/gnome family of DEs, xfce, lxde, etc, are planning, but with kde going the opposite direction of gnome, it would seem a mistake to talk about the big DE's hard- requiring systemd, and it getting harder and harder to run them on anything else. Because really, that appears to be mainly gnome, only one of the big two. So a more accurate statement would be gnome-specific, since they've already announced systemd to be a hard requirement for them, going forward. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
