[arch-general] systemd new dependencies impede using OpenRC

[Daniel Micay]

> WHAT? The opinion of users has no weight here ?!?!?!

Popular opinion has no weight. Zero. Technical arguments have weight but
most of them have already been debated for ages. There's a strong
consensus among the developers (and trusted users / other people who
contribute, but that's less important) in support of the status quo.

Additionally, if by 'here' you mean arch-general... most developers
probably don't subscribe to this list at all. It's used for requesting
help and flame wars. I'm quite sure that nothing said in this thread is
going to have any impact on Arch's development. There's little else to
be said about these topics. It's just a repeat of the same things over
and over again and that's exactly why it's not on the radar in terms of
development.

> I came to Arch because th way it is built and "marketed" looked like a real
> community and user centric, user centric not to be as easy as pushing a
> button, but in the way that i can install, configure, and use it the way i
> want to.
> Is that real?

It's a community distribution in the sense that the developers aren't
paid employees and there's no backing corporation. You can install,
configure and use it however you want but the developers are only going
to support the use cases they care about. In the base system, there's
usually *one* supported option for that component (glibc, libstdc++,
libsupc++, coreutils/util-linux, systemd, binutils/gcc, etc.). As a
binary distribution, it *has* to make many of these decisions, and
others like choosing one init system need to be made to have a polished,
maintainable distribution.

> If Arch is becoming a personal distribution to attend the developers, so
> let it clrealy in the website, so we consider choosing a new way.
> But to realize such an affirmation is a little bit dismotivating at minimum.

It has always been a distribution built around the technical views of
the developers. Unlike many other distributions, it doesn't try to
appeal to a broad audience. That's what makes it Arch rather than say a
distribution like OpenSUSE.

There's always room for more contributors, and they'll quickly become
trusted users / developers if they're talented and get along with the
other developers. The people doing the work are the ones making the
decisions, as things usually are in open source projects.

> The real POINT here is that, ANY decision made (not only systemd) have its
> pros and cons, but when someone ask for something different or question
> that, it is wise to listen, think, and answer in an polite way.
> Recently i am seeing much rage in talks, i think i will be better, and
> constructive, to filter better the words so that we can have a kind of a
> talk.

It's not like this is a technical discussion providing anything positive
for the distribution's development. It would be a lot more constructive
for everyone to avoid wasting time like this.

The constructive thing to do is accepting that Arch isn't a meta
distribution like Gentoo. It only supports choice *above* the layer of
the base system. You don't get to replace glibc, the toolchain, the core
utilities, the init system / core services (i.e. systemd), etc. without
venturing into extremely painful unsupported territory.

There are *lots* of other distributions, and most settle on either using
systemd or not supporting it *at all*, up to the point that unit files
are stripped out of packages (as Alpine does).

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