Re: [gentoo-dev] Questions about SystemD and OpenRC

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Canek Peláez Valdés <caneko@×××××.com> wrote:
> You can get as much vertical integration with Gentoo as with any other
> distro. The problem (and I think this is the point Greg is trying to
> make) is that it will be harder (not impossible, just harder) if most
> of Gentoo developers really believe that every single possible
> combination of hardware, software, init systems, and even OS kernels
> should be supported.

It isn't impossible for Gentoo to build a moon lander or for the
Foundation to buy the entire planet - just hard.  However, in practice
things that require resources we don't have simply won't happen.

Right now having decent KDE and Gnome support with all the bells and
whistles that works fine on FreeBSD as well as Linux isn't that hard,
because this trend towards vertical integration is just getting
started.  Running that on OSX under Prefix is already pretty painful
(not sure if anybody has actually pulled it off - I'm sure it is
possible).

It will likely get harder, which means in practice what we'll probably
have is a reasonable compromise which will never be quite as polished
in any one direction as it could be, unless the end user does the
polishing.

RE you concerns about OpenRC being in @system.  Personally I'm a fan
of getting rid of @system entirely except as something used to build
install CDs or having some sets for convenience in building systems.
It only exists for a few reasons that I can think of:
1.  Devs don't want to have ebuilds that capture dependencies on every
little thing.  A few well-chosen virtuals like "shell utilities" or
whatever might help with this.
2.  Things like Prefix rely on the system not installing local copies
of libraries in the core system it needs to link to.  Careful use of
package.provided in profiles might address this.
3.  We'd need many more virtuals to handle situations like FreeBSD
where people don't what GNU on their systems.  Right now if they are
system packages they just define system appropriately and ebuilds
don't directly pull in the GNU stuff anyway.

I'm sure there could be others.  Keep in mind that systemd is still
pretty new and largely out-of-the-blue so it will take time for Gentoo
to adjust to it.  Right now OpenRC might install executables, but
nothing should be actually running them - this is just wasted
compilation time which isn't a bad interim state to be in.  If
virtualizing udev is causing controversy just wait until somebody
actually makes a push to remove OpenRC from @system...

Rich