On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 8:47 AM, Sylvain Alain <d2racing...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi everyone, for a couple of months now, I see on the list some of > activities about OpenRC been ported to FreeBSD or OpenRC to Debian and other > stuff related to SystemD. >
You and half the world. Most of the issues you raise are much bigger than Gentoo and are taking the whole linux world by storm. > I have some basic questions about all that : > > 1. The SystemD and Udev projetcs are merged now, so what is the impact on > the Gentoo on a short term period ? In the short term nothing, although systemd has half-decent support now, the default remains openrc and there are no plans to change that. > > 2. I saw on some lists that Gnome/Kde and Xfce plan to use some SystemD API, > so does it means that we will need to install SystemD aside of OpenRC ? > Now, no. In the future - nobody really knows for sure, but it seems likely that at least in some cases not only will you need to install it, but you'll need to run it also. I'd heard only Gnome was moving in this direction, but perhaps other projects are as well. I'd be surprised if Xfce moves in this direction - they've always been about being minimal. > 3. In a long term vision, can OpenRC still exist on a Gentoo box(OpenRC > might be able to boot the box then give the control to SystemD/Udev for the > rest of the boot process) or we will need to migrate to SystemD to be able > to use Gnome/Kde or Xfce ? > If you do need systemd for gnome/etc then most likely you'll just want to use it across the board. Trying to run some kind of a hybrid seems like the worst of both worlds. > 4. Finally, is there any reason why Gnome/Kde/Xfce wants to add deps related > to SystemD ? I don't understand why these desktops want to depend on a > specific Sysint.... You'd have to talk to them, but I believe their goal is to go for more of a vertically-integrated experience (which fits more with Gnome or KDE than Xfce, but again the last I'd heard only Gnome was going in this direction so far). Ubuntu is doing similar things with Unity/Upstart. I don't know everything that the integration will support, but I can imagine they're interested in things like better WiFi and network roaming support (re-set your network, re-configure your firewall settings, update the UI, etc), better behavior during suspend/resume/etc, handling of things like bluetooth, and so on. I don't run linux on a laptop unless you count my Chromebook so I can't really vouch for what the current experience is like or what needs improvement. I've tried to stick to the facts here, at least as far as I'm aware of them. I don't think we need another 50-post thread on The Unix Way(TM) and whether it is a good or bad thing. These developments are going to be a challenge for distros like Gentoo or Debian that aim to be general/meta distributions. It used to be that you could swap out major components and all the APIs/interfaces still worked. In the future it might be much harder to run Gnome on Gentoo on an OSX kernel, etc. However, all of this is a bit speculative and it is hard to say how things will actually turn out. Rich
