Originally posted by Teho
View Post
GNOME does not have a hard dependency on systemd. It only requires logind for the Wayland support in Mutter in 3.9/3.10; Wayland support is still under development and if you run X11 the dependency is still optional. Some things assume some functionality in an init system that not every init system could do (e.g. clean all the children of a daemon; GDM 3.8+). Wayland support in Mutter relies on logind to handle VT switching and some other tasks IIRC (so the Wayland bit in Mutter, not Wayland itself). This means that in future if we'd _only_ have Wayland support it would result in a hard logind depedency (thus systemd).
Now for logind, systemd changed after Canonical packaged it so that logind requires systemd due to cgroups. But that was not a known change, we assumed we it was more portable and would stay that way.
Note that I had pretty extensive discussion on #gentoo-desktop regarding the issues that they face. GNOME within Gentoo still might depend on systemd to make it easier to avoid any issues, but that would (at the moment) be more to reduce the amount of work to package it. Providing choice simply requires effort.
For people suggesting that ConsoleKit should be used: If I check the git logs, the logs indicate that it was started by William Jon McCann, a person involved within GNOME. Aside from that you see various other GNOME developers. If the people (not me) who wrote and for a long time maintained ConsoleKit give their opinion, I assume it is worth listening to. They ensure non-logind is possible. In GNOME 3.8 as well as upcoming GNOME 3.10 (except Wayland support).
It would be nice if logind did not depend on systemd.
PS: Functionality of OpenRC was extended for GNOME 3.8 in Gentoo. IIRC by GNOME packagers in Gentoo.
Leave a comment: