Dear all,

there seem to be a few trends that will mean major changes, and in some cases great improvements, for Linux in general. Two examples are new boot systems to replace Sys V, such as Upstart, and Wayland to replace X. Especially the latter seems to have great potential.

Of course, it's to early to include any of them in Slackware. but I still wonder, if Slackware users (not only me) would welcome these new approaches in future versions of our favourite distro.

What do you think?
What other trends to you see to be watched?

gargamel


EDIT: Added three words to make clear that Wayland is to replace X, not Sys V.

Isn't Wayland a replacement for X, not the boot process?

Yeah, Wayland is the replacement for X. I'm always happy with the software selection included with Slackware. We have software that works out of the box. I appreciate the fact that the Slackware Team thoroughly tests software prior to including it.

Wayland might be good if it actually works, but it is so far from the present that talking about its potential inclusion is pointless. As for upstart...it looks promising for the future and will probably replace SysV in most distros at some point. It also represents an increase in complexity in comparison to Slackware's init script system (using SysV init but with serialized BSD-style init scripts). I wouldn't object to upstart's inclusion at some point, though it does have a learning curve since it takes over (or will take over) for so much of the current GNU/Linux system.

As a relatively uneducated end-user I'll trust Pat and the Team to choose whats best. I'm sure if either Wayland or Upstart provide a better experience they'll work their way into the distro. Sounds like they're a long ways off though.

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I think / hope that Slackware stays well away from that bleeding edge stuff. Let Ubuntu users do the bleeding.

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I agree with those two. I'm confident that any major changes will be made because they're either useful or inevitable, not simply because they're new.

Reminds me of PAM some 10 years ago.

Look where we are now ... Slackware still going strong and no PAM to be seen within.

Wayland could be good. It has the potential to simplify things. It all depends on how well they implement it.

IMO Upstart and Systemd just make things more complex, and all in the name of shaving off a few seconds - that no one will notice anyway - from the boot time.
No thianks! I'll stick with Slackware's SYSV/BSD hybrid init system.

Yeah, but sometimes that can be a prob... more and more apps are being created PAM-aware. I've avoided installing PAM on any of my Slackware boxes so far (I once completey nuked an install with PAM), but I may have to yet.

lol, what's PAM? Everything works fine on my Slackware machine, even without PAM. I can remember that I had this package installed on some other distro but I never really worked with it, or at least, I can't remember working with it explicitly. ^^

As already written, I think Pat will do the right choice and keep unstable and/or useless software out of the distro.

From what I remember PAM is insecure and not well maintained, and so is not included until it changes.

That was true perhaps a decade ago, around the time I made the now infamous comment about "PAM == SCAM". Back then, many applications either had to be patched to add PAM support, or if they had PAM support it probably needed additional patches to work right. These days, the opposite is just as likely to be true. Especially with things such as ConsoleKit and polkit (which we pretty much have to include in order to provide a functional desktop), we are finding that the non-PAM code is not as well tested, and that we've had to patch things in order to work with the traditional shadow based authentication. Eventually these developments are likely to force our hand with regard to PAM (but not in the immediate future).

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I see, thanks for the clarification.

I agree with posts 6, 7, 8, 9, and 11 quite thoroughly; but in my own words:

I don't care enough about the increase in boot/startup speed, to be very interested in the rest of what Upstart brings, including complexity if it is indeed complex. If it comes along sometime in Slack as an alternative configuration perhaps (maybe during install?), and it's accompanied by some of that typically great documentation that Slack is known for, then I'd probably try it and see how it compared to the other way. If I like what I see, I'd look into learning more about how it works.

Wayland, if it will one day fully support all modern hardware & software stuff that a desktop/workstation/laptop is supposed to be able to do, (good, fast, fully functional graphics), AND works (or aims to) well with multiples of hardware (monitors, video cards), AND works well with both open and closed source drivers (or preferably works BETTER w/opensource than closed, even with multiple hardware) AND combined with the fact that Wayland itself is the compositor, then I am definitely interested in trying it out.
Meanwhile though, it is very far from most or all the above, so I don't expect or particularly desire for it to be included any time soon. One day, yes. But not soon.