Are we realizing that in order to keep systemd out of our way, we're currently writing and maintaining drop-in replacements for the features that systemd is already providing in an actively maintained state? openrc-settingsd was the first thing that we as Gentoo developers (Pacho?) had to write in order to merge GNOME 3.6 into our tree.
And now that GNOME 3.8 is out, the game starts over again: logind is a hard requirement, logind is part of systemd, starting logind (which replaces consolekit) is not that trivial as you may think (and is the thing I started to work on anyway). And if this wasn't enough, it means that if you want GNOME 3.8, you need to get logind, which may or not may get included in our udev ebuild and if it won't, it means that you will be forced to use systemd as device manager if you want GNOME 3.8, which is believe it or not, the thing that Ubuntu did. The problem will only increase in size as the clock moves. And (and!) how does all this fit together with eudev? If the idea is to either put logind in udev (thus, not creating a separate logind ebuild), it means that eudev is already a dead end for GNOME users, unless the eudev team is going to provide logind as well. I don't want to start a flamewar here, I was the one who called Lennart software lennartware, but science is science, and a reality check had to be done: at some near point in the future, our users will be forced to replace udev/eudev with systemd. Like it. Or not. While I successfully use both openrc and systemd, I _do_ think that (and expect to see) more and more users (and developers) will be switching to systemd. Is there anything we can do? Besides "being prepared", I don't think so. Do we control upstreams? No, sorry. So what do we want to do then? Isolate from the rest of the world? (It's not a sarcastic question). I hope that everybody does their own reality check. -- Fabio Erculiani
