Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Friday February 20 2015, @01:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-perhaps-it-will-work dept.

Earlier this week, KDE developer David Edmundson described in his blog how KDE would be tied to logind and timedated but not systemd itself, at least according to his claim that "The init system is one part of systemd that doesn't affect us at all, and any other could be used.".

Later, in the blog comments, he clarifies that starting with plasma 5.5, in 6 months, they'll drop "legacy" support, according to a decision taken in the plasma sprint.

Even if one can only guess why there is no formal announcement, it seems clear - unless somehow there is a shim or emulator, not only for logind but also for timedated, in 6 months KDE will be unusable unless you are running systemd. And the blog entry makes it clear that the plan is to remove more and more functionality from KDE and use systemd instead.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by engblom on Friday February 20 2015, @03:29PM

    by engblom (556) on Friday February 20 2015, @03:29PM (#147430)

    Refactoring is one thing and rewriting for the sake of rewriting is another. For example, OSS has seen several refactoring in the BSD world. Nowadays you can play sound from many sources without using esd/artsd/whatever. That was not possible in the beginning. Alsa was a complete rewrite.

    Systemd is not a refactoring. It is a total rewrite of the init system.

    With KDE4, really big parts were rewritten.

    The only thing I mentioned which is pretty much refactoring is xorg.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=1, Informative=3, Total=4
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Friday February 20 2015, @03:51PM

    by Marand (1081) on Friday February 20 2015, @03:51PM (#147446) Journal

    For example, OSS has seen several refactoring in the BSD world. Nowadays you can play sound from many sources without using esd/artsd/whatever. That was not possible in the beginning. Alsa was a complete rewrite.

    You keep mentioning OSS vs ALSA, but you have yet to mention one of the motivations for a rewrite: the OSS license was changed from free to proprietary, which effectively left it abandoned for Linux and BSDs. With that in mind, it's not really surprising that developers on the GPL side would decide to start over and make the new project GPL to prevent the same thing happening again. Especially when faced with putting considerable effort into fixing the outdated OSS that they got stuck with because of the abrupt license change.

    It's easy to forget that now, since it's largely glossed over these days, especially with most Linux users showing up well after the spat occurred. Plus OSS was eventually re-licensed again back to an open license (actually multiple...). However, at this point, switching back to OSS would be a massive undertaking, and would require trusting the owner to not pull the rug out from under everybody a second time.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @04:01PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @04:01PM (#147453)

      Actually, Alsa was not the only licensing-driven change. x.org was triggered by an XFree86 license change. Gnome was started because of licensing issues with the original KDE (or rather, the underlying Qt framework), which later got resolved.

      However there's no licensing reason for pulseaudio, Gnome 3, KDE 4, systemd and Wayland.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Friday February 20 2015, @04:35PM

        by Marand (1081) on Friday February 20 2015, @04:35PM (#147465) Journal

        I was actually covering some of that in another response to his original "reinventing the wheel" comment , but it turned into a very long post, so it took a bit to get it typed out and try to check for obvious errors. I forgot to mention Xorg vs XFree86 though, thanks for bringing that one up. A lot of the changes have been licensing related. Or Poettering NIH-related (pulse, systemd).

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by engblom on Friday February 20 2015, @04:36PM

      by engblom (556) on Friday February 20 2015, @04:36PM (#147466)

      If OSS changed from free to proprietary license you should fork what you have rather than rewriting from scratch. They wanted to reinvent the wheel rather than forking which proves my point.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @04:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @04:57PM (#147474)

      It's been almost 20 years already, but I thought the reason for moving to ALSA was to move away from Hannu Savolainen(?)'s commercial-open source split Open Sound System to something that was owned by the community.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @07:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20 2015, @07:17PM (#147526)

      OSS was maintained elsewhere. The author always produced two versions of it, one GPL and one not. The non-GPL version included drivers that were based on NDA info. The GPL version included everything else. Everybody was OK with this.

      The problem was that the non-GPL OSS version was also available for UnixWare, OpenServer, Solaris, and FreeBSD. This required a kernel abstraction layer, which is verboten in the Linux world. Linux kernel coding standards prohibit any sort of compatibility layer because such layers make life difficult for kernel developers.

      Alan Cox (at Red Hat at the time) ripped out the kernel compatibility layer. In doing so, he forked OSS. He soon lost interest in maintaining OSS, as you'd expect given his reason for forking was not a desire to write audio drivers. Linux OSS was thus badly maintained, missing out on all sorts of new features that mainline OSS (as seen in FreeBSD and elsewhere) was getting.

      The ALSA people came alone proposing a solution. They would provide the features that Linux had been missing out on, and they would take care of audio. Linux accepted... then came close to ripping ALSA back out again when he saw what a mess it was. The very worst of it got patched up. It's still garbage, with a Windows-style library interface instead of a documented device file interface.

      • (Score: 1) by WillR on Friday February 20 2015, @09:36PM

        by WillR (2012) on Friday February 20 2015, @09:36PM (#147602)

        It's still garbage, with a Windows-style library interface instead of a documented device file interface.

        Serious question from someone who hasn't used *BSD on a machine with sound hardware lately: how does modern OSS (or anything else that does sound output The Unix Way(tm) by writing to a documented device file) handle multiple apps trying to play sounds at the same time? In the 1990s on Linux OSS/free it was either "you can't do that" or "use ESounD and esddsp", neither of which was entirely satisfactory...