On Tue, 2012-01-03 at 14:35 -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> 2012/1/3 Olivier Crête <tester@g.o>:
> > A couple years ago, Gentoo was the forward looking distribution, ready
> > to try radical changes that break existing assumption, like our init
> > scripts with dependencies or our early use of udev. These days, I see so
> > much resistance to progress, it makes me sad.
> 
> I think the key is to keep huge changes optional to start with.  This
> one feels like it is being pushed upon us.
> 
> I don't really have a big problem with moving to /usr and all that.
> However, I do have some concerns with the larger direction that
> everybody is taking with vertical integration (which this is just a
> part of).  For example, if eventually you can't run gnome without
> systemd where does that leave bsd gentoo users?  Gentoo is about
> choice, and various upstream efforts are moving in the direction of
> giving users only one choice - take it or leave it.  How do you
> install KDE and Gnome on the same system when they eventually want
> different sysvinit implementations.  Will the RedHat and Ubuntu of the
> future have no more in common than Tivo and Android do today?

Well, don't worry, the KDE people don't have the will or the means to
make their own init system.. And rumor is that Ubuntu may be switching
to systemd in the near future too.

With a Linux kernel, you already need some Linux specific things like
udev, ifconfig/ip, etc. In the new world, you also have a Linux specific
init system. The BSD people are free to do whatever they want, they can
try to keep up with the Linux kernel, but good luck to them. Or they can
stay in the 80s. My advice to them is to admit that Linux is so far
ahead that they can't catch up and just join us.

Honestly, we should not promote choice at the expense of quality,
maintainability and reliability and these are the decisions that have
been made by the udev/systemd/etc upstreams. All of the init systems of
each Linux distribution has been doing the same thing in slightly
incompatible ways, so everyone has to maintain separate init scripts, on
each distro you have to remember where to set things like the hostname
(/etc/conf.d/hostname, /etc/hostname, /etc/rc.d/hostname, /etc/system/hostname, etc/wtf), etc. One of the key goals of systemd is to reduce this confusion by standardising the boot process across all distributions.

Vertical integration is the only way we can make things "Just Work" for
the users, we tried to do abstraction layers (HAL for example), but it
has been a failure. In the GNOME project, we're trying to make the Linux
desktop awesome, and we plan to fix any part of the puzzle that would
prevent us from achieving that goal.

-- 
Olivier Crête
tester@g.o
Gentoo Developer