How to handle KDE not respecting YOUR distros requirements?

[Eric Hameleers]

A bit late to the party.
First. You need tp realize that unlike big distros like redhat or 
opensuse, the Slackware team is a very small group of volunteers, lead 
by one man. Each of us in that small team do not focus entirely on one 
subset of the distro like KDE, which means we do not write code to 
integrate upstream software. Slackware's approach is that all code 
should come from the upstream - we only patch obvious faults.
Sure, we do not carry systemd but we do have eudev and ConsoleKit2 
which should be sufficient to cover as dependencies for KDE's logind 
requirements. Graesslin and I have a common ground there.
That is not even in question. My rant was about the ignorant system 
message on a locked system that did not allow me to log back in, 
instructing me to something ridiculous - in my view. If Graesslin took 
offense, then rightly so, and he already indicated that the 
informational message could have been better.

My real frustration was the display of arrogance - only the big 
distros would be catered for, the rest of us would have to adapt to a 
mandatory set of dependencies or perish. This coming right after the 
statement that KDE should care for more than just the big Linux 
distros - *BSD to be specific.

On Sat, 26 Mar 2016, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:

> As Martin put it: Patches to make our software work without systemd are always
> welcome, people calling us "crazy" are not.

You are completely missing the point. In my blog I make political 
statements, live with it. In these mailing lists and personal 
interactions with developers I work towards solving issues. Again, 
there was no "issue", just a misleading ignorant system message added 
by a developer with a limited point of view.
I provide early-access Plasma 5 packages to Slackware users precisely 
to fix these misses before the software gets added to the Slackware 
core.
KDE also does not depend on systemd, it depends on the logind dbus 
api. Which Slackware provides.

> That is why I asked for input from distributions in the thread about optional
> dependencies. We need to know from you which information you need, how and
> when you need it, so we can give it to you in the way you need it.
>
> Ware are not trying to force our way of communicating our dependencies onto
> you. We'd like to know from you what you need.
>
> I'll start a new thread for input on what distros need from us in general.

Thanks, that would be good.

>> As an aside - if KDE is prepared to be more flexible in order to
>> support *BSD distributions, where does this attitude that all Linux
>> distributions should conform to a template of KDE's choosing come
>> from? It seems to me to be a double standard that seems to be lacking
>> an anchor in common sense as far as I can parse.
>
> From what I've been told, the BSDs are actively working on offering
> compatibility layers for missing things like logind instead of saying "[BSD]
> does not have a steenking systemd". Why can't Slackware do the same?

Answered above.

Cheers, Eric

-- 
Eric Hameleers <alien at slackware.com>
Home: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/