Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
On 12/5/16, Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net wrote:
by contrast: fvwm2 is an 8 *megabyte* install size. gnome is... what... several hundred megabytes? latest versions force you to use wayland? and systemd?? fuck that!! absolutely no way i'm tolerating that.
GNOME does not force you to use Wayland. I don't know where you got this idea from. Wayland is still supported experimentally (X is used by default, Wayland support is quite buggy) last time I checked. As for systemd, GNOME requires logind, but not the entire systemd package.
that requires libsystemd, which i refuse to have on any machine that i am managing.
I really think that you should draw a line between libsystemd0 and systemd itself (whether running as init or not).
One of the functions that libsystemd provides is the ability to check whether systemd is available, so if you want there to be a vibrant ecosystem of packages that do not require systemd, then it's probably worth encouraging people to write programs that check if systemd is available, and then behave sensibly if it is not.
The alternative forces the systemd refuseniks to fork every package that might find any (even optional) use for systemd services, which a) there is not sufficient manpower for, and b) removes any pressure for the upstream to put effort into accommodating your needs, so they don't bother to maintain/add the conditional code.
That said, I don't have a lot of time for Gnome either, but that might be because a) I prefer Xmonad so I'm not their target audience, and b) I run Debian, and we're making life difficult for Gnome maintainers by continuing to ensure that using systemd as init is optional (unlike most other distros), and also constraining systemd when it is running as init to be backwards compatible with sysvinit in various ways, which means that there are things that Gnome can safely assume on the likes of Fedora which might not be true on a particular Debian install, so I guess Gnome on Debian has interesting little bugs that don't appear elsewhere.
If everyone that doesn't like systemd runs screaming away from Debian, shouting about libsystemd0, and doesn't bother to report bugs where our ambition to support other inits falls short, then they just ensure that the future they fear comes to pass.
A more nuanced response might be wise.
Cheers, Phil.