On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.dun...@cox.net> wrote:
[...]
> User perspective...
For the sake of having a user with a different point of view, let me
say that I firmly believe the new *kit daemons (along things like
pulseaudio, systemd, GNOME 3, KDE 4) are the future, and Gentoo should
drop support for older technologies as soon as possible. Emphasis in
"as soon as possible", not "today".
The groups model was good, 40 years ago. But it's restrictive (a group
gets all or nothing), inflexible, and it difficults the implementation
of nice GUIs that take care of them. And it's not only my point of
view: the people in the kernel, in freedesktop, and in GNOME and KDE
think similarly, and that's why this pletora of new *kit programs (and
related new technologies) are becoming mandatory to run not only
desktop workstations, but also servers and embeded systems.
And actually that's the most powerful reason for Gentoo to drop
support for the older technologies: The people who actually *writes*
the code are starting to drop support for them.
We should embrace the new technologies. Sure, sometimes a new
technology would turn out to be a mistake (HAL), or it would take a
while to get really good (pulseaudio, ALSA replacing OSS). But when
they finally get "there", it's worth every step of the way.
Of course they can take a while to get "there", and that's why I'm
saying that the support must be dropped "as soon as possible", not
"today". But eventualy said support must be dropped: The maintainers
of the code would not support it, so I don't see a reason to waste the
Gentoo developers time doing it.
I know a lot of people would be 100% against what I'm saying, and they
will be very vocal about it. But I just want to leave note that there
are people like me who actually want to embrace this new technologies,
and that we are willing to do the testing and suffer the pains of
trying the new technologies.
And I say this as a user of Unix since 1996, and writing this email in
my laptop running Gentoo with the systemd and GNOME 3 overlays
installed at the same time, and loving how the shape of the future
looks like.
Just my ${CURRENCY/100}.
Regards.
--
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
