On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 06:46:20PM +0100, Tom Gundersen wrote:
There has been a lot of changes lately, this is true. However, a lot of effort has been put into reaching consensus between the distros and the relevant upstream projects. Much more so now than before.
It is my impression that a majority of the ideas have originated in Debian and Fedora, but I don't really care who came up with what idea as long as we end up with the best ideas in the end (and possibly more importantly, that we all end up with the same ideas). As far as I can tell the different changes are receiving a lot of scrutiny within the different distros before being adopted (as one would expect); and overall we are all moving in the same direction.
One consequence of all these changes is dependency creep. Just one example: emacs depends (via gconf) on consolekit. I've been using emacs for > 15 years or so, and I've never seen it depend on PAM or Kerberos, SSH authentication subsystems, etc. It has no reason to depend on consolekit. And if it does by transitivity that should make its maintainers think twice. Allowing such a dependeny to exist is *bad engineering*. If this trend continues it will end with everything depending on everything. Which means there is no more choice. I know it's not and Arch thing, but still this is cause for concern. Ciao, -- FA Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal, die Sonne scheint - ein Glitzerstrahl.