Am Donnerstag, den 25.02.2010, 10:50 -0500 schrieb Bill Nottingham:
Christoph Wickert (christoph.wickert@googlemail.com) said:
[snipped]
Given the present situation:
- Has any Spin found the present situation unduly restrictive?
- If so, how specifically?
A spin is defined as installable Live-CD. This means it must ship anaconda and firstboot. firstboot requires system-config-keyboard requires metacity requires GConf2 and tons of other GNOME stuff. There are other dependency chains as well (e.g. notification-daemon), but this is the worst one.
I'm not sure what your objection is here. Are you objecting to the fact that it must be a LiveCD, the fact that the LiveCD installer uses anaconda/firstboot, or the dependencies of anaconda/firstboot?
Sorry if i was unclear: I am objecting to the dependencies of system-config-keyboard. AFAICS it is not run embedded in firstboot and there is no need for a window-manager at that point. authconfig-gtk on the other hand requires one because it starts popup windows, but these work fine with whatever window manager is available. You can see this in the spins already.
The first is a policy issue that could be redressed. The second is unlikely to change (and would imply you'd be signing up to write your own if you didn't want to use anaconda/firstboot, which I can't imagine is what you want), and the third probably requires patch submissions.
(Note: due to the requirements for a window manager at installation time, anaconda may very well require metacity in the near future.)
Why not a virtual provide and let the spin maintainers and users decide? In F12 we changed anaconda to use any display manager that has a virtual provides for "service(graphical-login)" instead of hardcoding a list of display managers. We should do the same for window manager. Introducing a new hardcoded requirement for metacity with all it's overhead is a step backwards and a punch in the face of all people who are not using GNOME.
For example, there is a package called gconf2-branding-openSUSE which contains all the modified GConf schemas. By replacing this package, you can change the complete settings of the GNOME desktop. This would be useful for us too, think of a GNOME based Fedora Mini Spin for Netbooks, that wants to use another other panel layout. We cannot do this in Fedora ATM, but it is possible.
What prevents you doing in in Fedora? Have you submitted a package review, or an example spec?
I cannot submit a package review because the files included in the package conflict with the current packages. Before we can change something we need a packaging policy and in the past the GNOME maintainers have been unwilling to support these kind of changes.
Bill
Regards, Christoph