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The problem I have with this approach - keep everything compatible and portable - is that it holds back development and puts the effort in other parts of the st

by elehack 13y ago

The problem I have with this approach - keep everything compatible and portable - is that it holds back development and puts the effort in other parts of the stack to waste. What is the point of awesome ‘new’ kernel features like cgroups if nothing in userspace really uses them? With systemd, I feel like my computer is actually taking advantage of being a modern Linux system, not just a warmed-over historical UNIX. With Gnome using systemd, it can take advantage of those capabilities as as well. If they do not depend on systemd, they have three options: 1. Don't have features that require its capabilities. 2. Have those features conditionally depending on whether systemd is present. This has at least 2 problems: inconsistent experience / feature set and maintenance of less-tested alternate code paths. 3. Implement fallbacks for systemd capabilities. This has more maintenance problems than (2), in addition to the redundant effort re-implementing (subsets of) features systemd provides. I prefer to see the Gnome leverage systemd and build an excellent platform. With scarce resources, (2) and (3) are a significant drag on the project. 'Choice' is not only hard, it requires time/money, and that time/money comes at the expense of other things that would benefit from it.

nwmcsween 13y ago
>keep everything compatible and portable - is that it holds back development and puts the effort in other parts of the stack to waste... This is utter crap, making things portable creates better code as you aren't tied to an implementation with bugs and incompatible features but to the interface you or someone else has written.
- bkor 13y ago
  As mentioned in the blog, almost all GNOME developers use a systemd distribution. How would adding another layer in between make things less buggy? Especially as almost nobody would test that code? GNOME will release 3.10.0. Gentoo seems to be integrating 3.8. That's a difference of 6 months! Way too late to do anything about bugs.
  - mrpdaemon 13y ago
    GNOME 3.8 has been available on Gentoo in various forms since April - first in the gnome overlay, then hardmasked in the portage tree, then unmasked into unstable/testing ie. ~arch. The (one month old) gentoo-dev thread that the blog author referred to is talking about the stabilization of GNOME 3.8, which is the tier used by the most conservative users who have chosen to only use well-tested software that is known to build/run well on their architecture and has received ample testing. This is not very different from binary distributions, Ubuntu 13.04 shipped on April 2013 with GNOME 3.6 from Sep 2012.
- nwmcsween 13y ago
  @bkor (cannot reply directly), What happens when another init takes it's place? The code in question would be riddled throughout with bugs and assumptions.

by elehack 13y ago

nwmcsween 13y ago

>keep everything compatible and portable - is that it holds back development and puts the effort in other parts of the stack to waste... This is utter crap, making things portable creates better code as you aren't tied to an implementation with bugs and incompatible features but to the interface you or someone else has written.

bkor 13y ago
As mentioned in the blog, almost all GNOME developers use a systemd distribution. How would adding another layer in between make things less buggy? Especially as almost nobody would test that code? GNOME will release 3.10.0. Gentoo seems to be integrating 3.8. That's a difference of 6 months! Way too late to do anything about bugs.
- mrpdaemon 13y ago
  GNOME 3.8 has been available on Gentoo in various forms since April - first in the gnome overlay, then hardmasked in the portage tree, then unmasked into unstable/testing ie. ~arch. The (one month old) gentoo-dev thread that the blog author referred to is talking about the stabilization of GNOME 3.8, which is the tier used by the most conservative users who have chosen to only use well-tested software that is known to build/run well on their architecture and has received ample testing. This is not very different from binary distributions, Ubuntu 13.04 shipped on April 2013 with GNOME 3.6 from Sep 2012.
nwmcsween 13y ago
@bkor (cannot reply directly), What happens when another init takes it's place? The code in question would be riddled throughout with bugs and assumptions.