On Fri, 20.08.10 03:52, Lennart Poettering (mzerqung@0pointer.de) wrote:
systemd is very generic low-level code, so there shouldn't be a technical barrier for other DEs adopting it too, and I'd welcome this very much. However, there are certain political issues that will make adoption by other DEs difficult: for one, systemd is Linux specific. While in the GNOME world the idea that Linux is the only OS that matters is kinda popular these days I assume that other DEs care much more about niche OSes (hey, and KDE even cares about Windows!).
Also, regardless of the DE there is still that distro with the 3 Us in its name which is unlikely to adopt systemd. Tying systemd into GNOME and the other DEs would probably cement what they are already doing: forking GNOME and maintaining things independently of upstream.
So, in summary, this is something to push forward very carefully, and as of now neither the technical nor the political preconditions have been figured out how to do this best.
Let me clarify this: if we adopt systemd for the session we need to do that in a way that is acceptable for the other OSes/distros which cannot or don't want to adopt systemd. We don't want to drive them away from contributing to GNOME upstream. It's a tightrope walk between innovating here and not breaking too much glass in the cooperation between th major players in GNOME land.
I do have a few ideas how to do this best, but this needs more thinking. i.e. in the long run we probably want to merge a lot of the CK functionality into systemd, and move some stuff currently done in gnome-session into it. We should do this in a way that Solaris and Ubuntu can still continue to use the current CK implementation and the current code in g-s, and both can still be considered GNOME.
But anyway, I don't like to talk too much about great plans for the distant future, and focus more on what we can do right now.
Lennart