Am Donnerstag, den 25.02.2010, 10:50 -0500 schrieb Bill Nottingham:
Christoph Wickert (christoph.wickert(a)googlemail.com) said:
> [snipped]
> >
> > Given the present situation:
> >
> > 1. Has any Spin found the present situation unduly restrictive?
> > 1. If so, how specifically?
>
> A spin is defined as installable Live-CD. This means it must ship
> anaconda and firstboot. firstboot requires system-config-keyboard
> requires metacity requires GConf2 and tons of other GNOME stuff. There
> are other dependency chains as well (e.g. notification-daemon), but this
> is the worst one.
I'm not sure what your objection is here. Are you objecting to the
fact that it must be a LiveCD, the fact that the LiveCD installer
uses anaconda/firstboot, or the dependencies of anaconda/firstboot?
Sorry if i was unclear: I am objecting to the dependencies of
system-config-keyboard. AFAICS it is not run embedded in firstboot and
there is no need for a window-manager at that point. authconfig-gtk on
the other hand requires one because it starts popup windows, but these
work fine with whatever window manager is available. You can see this in
the spins already.
The first is a policy issue that could be redressed. The second is
unlikely to change (and would imply you'd be signing up to write your
own if you didn't want to use anaconda/firstboot, which I can't imagine
is what you want), and the third probably requires patch submissions.
(Note: due to the requirements for a window manager at installation
time, anaconda may very well require metacity in the near future.)
Why not a virtual provide and let the spin maintainers and users decide?
In F12 we changed anaconda to use any display manager that has a virtual
provides for "service(graphical-login)" instead of hardcoding a list of
display managers. We should do the same for window manager. Introducing
a new hardcoded requirement for metacity with all it's overhead is a
step backwards and a punch in the face of all people who are not using
GNOME.
> For example, there is a package called gconf2-branding-openSUSE
which
> contains all the modified GConf schemas. By replacing this package, you
> can change the complete settings of the GNOME desktop. This would be
> useful for us too, think of a GNOME based Fedora Mini Spin for Netbooks,
> that wants to use another other panel layout. We cannot do this in
> Fedora ATM, but it is possible.
What prevents you doing in in Fedora? Have you submitted a package
review, or an example spec?
I cannot submit a package review because the files included in the
package conflict with the current packages. Before we can change
something we need a packaging policy and in the past the GNOME
maintainers have been unwilling to support these kind of changes.
Bill
Regards,
Christoph