[arch-general] My end-user $0.02 on /etc/rc.conf splitting.

[Fons Adriaensen]

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,


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FA

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