Bug#726675: gnome-settings-daemon: requires systemd

[Pierre Ynard]

Hello,

I use cinnamon. I jumped off the GNOME fail train exactly for this kind
of reasons and all the other ones. But it looks like I didn't steer far
away enough, because if I upgraded my system blindly it would still
install systemd thanks to gnome-settings-daemon.

So thanks for ruining it for cinnamon users too. Josh, it's funny how
you note that cinnamon is made available as an alternative, as if
that changes anything since they're both spoiled by pulling the same
GNOME/systemd/linux stack.

As far as I can tell in the changelog of this package, the reason why
the systemd dependency was added is:

> * Add a runtime dependency on systemd (except on hurd and kfreebsd)
>   as needed by the power plugin.

According to the policy a dependency would be warranted if systemd
was necessary for gnome-settings-daemon to provide a significant
amount of functionality. I find that it's rather in opposition with
the fact that systemd is needed by a *plugin*, *one* plugin. I tried
running cinnamon without gnome-settings-daemon and I was greeted by
a completely different and awkward look & feel, so I can see that
gnome-settings-daemon provides a significant amount of functionality
already, and that was without any power feature or systemd. So
technically this dependency is a policy violation, and this bug would
deserve a higher severity than wishlist. Please demote the dependency to
something like Recommends or Suggests.

Some of us people just want a simple classic desktop with a simple task
bar and just a couple buttons and applets, for their single-seat laptop
whose they are the single user. Without pulling lots of plumbing stack
that is completely useless to them and unwanted. It is really sad that
the only reason we can't have that is that somewhere there is a Depends
that really isn't. Or if it's really a RedHat/Canonical war, I'll just
rebuild the dependency away on my own, also my friend uses awesome and
it looks nicer every day.

-- 
Pierre Ynard
"Une âme dans un corps, c'est comme un dessin sur une feuille de papier."