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Comment by nwmcsween | Hacker News Reader

>keep everything compatible and portable - is that it holds back development and puts the effort in other parts of the stack to waste...

This is utter crap, making things portable creates better code as you aren't tied to an implementation with bugs and incompatible features but to the interface you or someone else has written.

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@bkor (cannot reply directly), What happens when another init takes it's place? The code in question would be riddled throughout with bugs and assumptions.

As mentioned in the blog, almost all GNOME developers use a systemd distribution. How would adding another layer in between make things less buggy? Especially as almost nobody would test that code?

GNOME will release 3.10.0. Gentoo seems to be integrating 3.8. That's a difference of 6 months! Way too late to do anything about bugs.

GNOME 3.8 has been available on Gentoo in various forms since April - first in the gnome overlay, then hardmasked in the portage tree, then unmasked into unstable/testing ie. ~arch. The (one month old) gentoo-dev thread that the blog author referred to is talking about the stabilization of GNOME 3.8, which is the tier used by the most conservative users who have chosen to only use well-tested software that is known to build/run well on their architecture and has received ample testing. This is not very different from binary distributions, Ubuntu 13.04 shipped on April 2013 with GNOME 3.6 from Sep 2012.

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