Adrian Bunk <b...@stusta.de> writes: > On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 11:22:06AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> There is a natural process here, where rarely-used configurations >> slowly stop working and people eventually decide not to bother to keep >> them working and move on to other things. Eventually, they may acquire >> RC bugs that no one wants to fix and be dropped, or the package >> maintenance team may decide that they just can't support the >> configuration any more, make a public call for people to step forward >> and maintain it, and, when that call isn't answered, drop support. > The problem is different - with systemd there is a fast process going > on where frequently-used configurations stop working without systemd. Are you only thinking of logind with desktop environments here, or are you thinking of something else? I don't think this process is actually very fast (we've been arguing about this for at least a year), and I think you're overstating this case, but maybe I missed something. If you're just referring to GNOME, one desktop environment currently switched over doesn't strike me as very fast, and whether that's the path forward for that desktop environment for jessie is to a large extent what we're debating here. I think it's also important here to distinguish between decisions that Debian maintainers make and decisions *upstream* makes that Debian maintainers choose not to *reverse*. Those are two very, very different situations, and I think they're being treated interchangeably way too much in these discussions. We ask Debian maintainers to integrate their packages with the distribution, but we don't, in general, ask them to maintain long-term major forks in order to do so. When we run into a situation where that looks like it might be necessary, we generally start a conversation about it and try to make a decision about the best path forward based on the specifics of that individual case. > And the problem is exactly that without a strong policy there will not > be RC bugs anywhere - when it is fine for everyone to depend on systemd, > then any bugs demanding support for other init systems can just be > tagged "wontfix" by the Debian maintainer of the package. This sounds like you're assuming a level of bad faith that I really don't think is appropriate. I don't want to give Debian maintainers orders in advance just because we're worried they might otherwise do the wrong thing. I think it's more likely that they'll make *better* decisions for their own packages when people aren't telling them specifically what to do, just advising on general project direction. > Are in your opinion Debian's non-Linux ports part of the core > functionality that we should try to support? No, which is not the same thing as saying that they're not supported. (More than 80% of the packages I maintain are similarly not part of the core functionality we should try to support.) > AFAIR even the "make logind usable without systemd" discussions don't > mention that this won't make logind available for Debian's non-Linux > ports. That's been discussed at length in the bug to which you are responding. I realize it's quite long and has quite a lot of messages, though, so it's easy to lose track of what's been talked about. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
