I agree with the sentiment of not having hard deps on systemd. In fact many teams already put some actual work toward that goal (eg. the GNOME team) but the mai

I agree with the sentiment of not having hard deps on systemd. In fact many teams already put some actual work toward that goal (eg. the GNOME team) but the main problem I see is who is mandated to do this work. As an example, GNOME upstream requires logind if you don't want to rely on the bug-ridden and unmaintained ConsoleKit. AFAIK the Debian GNOME team does not wish to enable the ConsoleKit backend on Linux due to not having enough resources to test it and nobody stepped up to maintain it. While they initially represented this fact with a dependency on systemd, but ultimately said dependency is now on libpam-systemd, which depends on systemd or systemd-shim. So it's not like Debian teams are against what the GR proposes, but it's easy to see the GR as a way to force them to do work that they don't have the resources to do.