Hi Olav,

seeing a core member of the GNOME team posting here is quite a surprise :-)

I'm writing to both your private address and the list because I don't
know whether you just did a one-shot post or are actually subscribed.

Forgive me if you get a dupe or I mess up your procmail/Sieve filters.

And, as usual, I'm just a contributor: whatever I write here is my POV
and it might be overridden at any moment by the people in charge ;-)

On 05/12/2014 14:35, Olav Vitters wrote:
> There's so much hate going on in within Devuan, it is rather ridiculous.
> This is a public mailing list!

As people (myself included) already stated, we should try to stick to
technical arguments. This does not prevent people from coming here and
posting mails which basically amount to rants without technical merit.

(and no, I don't think that preventive moderation is an acceptable
solution - it reeks too much of a walled-garden for my liking, IMVHO).

> To nobody in specific: If there are needs with concrete technical
> solutions and a willingness to commit, feel free to have a discussion
> with either release-team@??? or on desktop-devel-list@???.

That will happen in due time. As you might have guessed, the current
focus is neither GDM/GNOME nor the average "desktop use case". Most of
us are concerned about our own servers (especially those who have issues
integrating systemd in their current software stack), so the current
priorities of the project are a bit far from the X11 land.

I concur that it's difficult to understand *what* those priorities are
since most of the real work right now happens mostly off-the-record on
IRC (aside from commits on git), perhaps Jaromil or Franco (or someone
else entirely) should set them down in a public post :-)

> You can also choose to continue with hate, assuming the worst from
> anyone and assume it's just a case of packaging things differently while
> demand work to "happen".

Absolutely not. We don't demand things to "happen": we wouldn't be here
taking _a lot_ of flak from all directions[1] if we believed in that[2].

> Devuan is very young so there's a lot of leeway. Concretely: this is an
> open email that GNOME is totally ok with technical discussions. I do
> assume it'll be with people who did a proper analysis and without the
> hate.

I'm extremely glad that you're willing to listen to technical arguments
and don't shun the project on the premise that it's working on keeping
systemd optional. That's *very* good news :-)

More to the point: some of us on IRC performed a technical analysis of
gdm3 and what would be required to support it on non-systemd systems,
but that was just some "scouting" work. The current development work is
still very far from hitting GNOME, so there isn't a clear policy on that
yet.

Also, it would be premature to get in touch with you without even having
a proof-of-concept on how GNOME could work on non-logind systems. Some
alternatives were raised on IRC, but - again - it's still too early to
even try hacking our way into gdm3.

> Note: Willingness to commit I mean that if there's work to be done, the
> proposer ensures it'll get done plus takes responsibility for
> maintenance.

Nobody is asking GNOME to take over support for code written by 3rd
parties. That would be rather idiotic.

But let's not discuss policy issues until we cross that bridge. What
matters is that there is an open line of communication instead of a
simple "meh, whatever, let them burn themselves".

[1]: ironically even from people who staunchly oppose systemd, which
believe the project position in that regard is "too soft"... oh well...

[2]: or to put it in another way, if we were people "demanding" work
from others, we would have flooded BTS _to death_ with requests for
sysvinit support instead of doing things ourselves - that would have
been far easier that getting caught in a flamefest and at the same time
trying to get a distro rolling.

Kind regards,
--
Matteo Panella