On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 10:45:13PM +0200, Karol Babioch wrote:
Am 22.07.2012 22:26, schrieb Fons Adriaensen:
Simple example: I didn't have consolekit for some years, and I don't care about whatever it has to offer. Recent updates of xdm have pulled it in. So far it hasn't done anything evil except being useless and consuming system resources (50 or so threads). Same about polkit, it's pulled in only as a depency of gconf which in turn is only there because the Emacs package wants it.
But this does not have anything to do with the recent proposal / change of the "rc.conf" and the split up coming along with this. So you shouldn't mix things up here.
True. As usual the discussion expanded...
Am 22.07.2012 22:26, schrieb Fons Adriaensen:
How much more of this useless stuff is going to be added without any way to opt out in the future ? I can perfectly understand that those things could be useful on a typical bloated consumer desktop.
You are always free to change the PKGBUILD. The really easy packaging system Arch is providing is a real advantage over any other distribution I've seen so far.
Again true. But having to manually modify lots of packages somehow defeats the purpose of having an easy to use distro.
What do you expect the maintainer of these packages to do anyway? In order to provide useful packages for the majority of people they have to pull this things in, there is just no way around it.
Yes there is. Take again the xdm example. Why do we have dynamic libs ? There is really nothing to stop the xdm developer to write his code such that it will use consolekit *if it is installed* and do without it otherwise. It doesn't have to be a dependency, that is just bad design. And anyway, if a login has to be declared as a consolekit session that could as well be done outside xdm. This sort of thing shoulnd't be hardcoded into binaries. The dumbest thing I've come across was in Fedora 8 or so where some well hidden *binary* file, called from god knows where - I never found out - was used to create 'Desktop', 'Music', etc. directories in the user's home on each login. Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)