[arch-general] ConsoleKit replaced by systemd

[Tom Gundersen]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 6:23 PM, Karol Babioch <karol at babioch.de> wrote:
> Just recently I've realized that ConsoleKit is not maintained actively
> anymore and the focus is on systemd right now (see [1]). This is already
> mentioned in the wiki [2].
>
> Unfortunately I couldn't find any statement as to whether Arch will
> follow along with this. I'm running GNOME right now and at least have
> two dependencies for ConsoleKit: gdm and gnome-session.

Many packages allow you to chose between systemd and consolekit
support. However, most of them only allow this choice at compile time.
For the time being we are sticking with consolekit, as otherwise the
packages would be useless for people not using systemd (consolekit can
still be used with systemd so the other way around is not a problem).

Hopefully more packages (upstream) will eventually allow both
consolekit and systemd support to be compiled in, and the choice be
made at runtime.

> I couldn't find anything in regard to this issue in the bug tracker, so
> I'm wondering whether there has been some discussion over that already?

I think the current state of affairs is fairly well summed up here:
<https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2012-April/022803.html>.

> I know there have been some discussions about systemd in the past, but
> are there any definite plans to switch "completely" to systemd at some
> point in the future? It seems that the package "initscripts-systemd" is
> more or less on feature parity with "initscripts" already.
>
> The reason why I'm asking is that I don't think that this kind of
> "double tracked" approach we are currently following, will work very
> well in the long run, especially when systemd is superseding more and
> more other packages.

No decision has been made, or even discussed, regarding wether or not
to switch entirely to systemd. My intention is to keep supporting the
"double track" until either initscripts or systemd dies a natural
death due to lack of testers, but maybe others have other plans. We
will see.

In the meantime I (and others) have put quite some effort into making
sure that the configuration files of systemd and initscripts are
interchangeable. As well as replacing a lot of the initscripts code by
calls to systemd tools. This should make any transition as pain-free
as possible.

The only thing left on my TODO is to rework our crypttab syntax (if
you follow arch-projects I'll post an RFC in the coming days).

Cheers,

Tom