[oi-dev] Gnome discusses going Linux-only

[Alasdair Lumsden]

On 20 May 2011, at 15:39, Shawn Thompson wrote:

> If you were under a rock yesterday, you may have heard that there are now discussions on the GNOME mailing list about making the Systemd init system a dependency of GNOME 3.2 (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-May/msg00432.html) in order to improve its integration with the system its placed atop. Unfortunately, if this were to occur, it would effectively (unless otherwise coded) end support for non-Linux based systems. Of course this might be a problem if this were to occur, since we are of course, a non-Linux based system, and active development of Gnome 2.x has effectively ended in favour of Gnome 3.x.

Hi Shawn,

There's been discussion on openindiana-discuss about this. We all of course hope this doesn't come to pass; it's not in the spirit of open source, and would seem counter-productive for the GNOME team to go down this route.

> So it comes to this, if on the oft-chance this ''does'' occur (alongside the shockwaves it'll probably send through the world), do we have any contingency plans on what we could do to get around it? Stay on Gnome 2.x? Switch desktops entirely? Make a new GTK3-based one?

If this did go ahead, there are options available, such as coding around the issue/integrating SMF support as a replacement. Forking GNOME or making a new desktop environment is beyond the scope of the project at this point, unless a flurry of committed devs appeared.

At the end of the day, if GNOME disappeared tomorrow, there are other desktop environments we could adopt (as if we didn't have enough work already!)

Cheers,

Alasdair