Comment by ktm5j
2 days ago
From the announcement, it saddens them too:
> As a personal note, I do not like this decision. To me LFS is about learning how a system works. Understanding the boot process is a big part of that. systemd is about 1678 "C" files plus many data files. System V is "22" C files plus about 50 short bash scripts and data files.
However the reasoning they provide makes sense.. It's hard to build a Linux system with a desktop these days without Sysd.
Is it? What's the connection between systemd and having a desktop?
Read the article: "The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd"
> It's hard to build a Linux system with a desktop these days without Sysd.
Most Gentoo Linux desktop users disagree. In fact, OpenRC is the default in that distro.
Having said that, I do expect that Gentoo has more manpower available than LFS.
Maybe they're KDE users. I was under the impression that gnome requires it. FTA it sounds like KDE will soon too. Gentoo doesn't come with a desktop by default either, you have to emerge it, which might install systemd..
FTA: "The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd"
> I was under the impression that gnome requires it.
It doesn't seem to require it at this moment. I have "-systemd" in my USE flags, and have neither sys-apps/systemd nor gnome-base/gnome currently installed. After enabling several USE flags that have nothing to do with systemd [0], emerge was quite happy to offer to install gnome-base/gnome and its dependencies, and absolutely did not offer to install systemd.
Honestly, I don't even know if GNOME has a hard dependency on Wayland... I see many of the dependent packages in the 'gnome-*' categories have an "X" USE flag. I CBA to investigate, though.
Is KDE Plasma building in hard systemd requirements, or is it just building in hard Wayland requirements? I'd known about the latter [1] and -because I'd thought it was important to the KDE folks that KDE runs on BSD- would be surprised if they irreversibly tethered themselves to systemd.
[0] introspection pulseaudio vala server screencast wayland theora eds egl gles2
[1] Though do note that the same blog post that announced the change in policy for Plasma also announced that no other KDE software was going to have a hard dependency on Wayland for the foreseeable future.