If the "competing alternatives" don't need it then I would advise those projects to put their money where their mouth is and either start making improvements to elogind, or develop a new login manager that better fulfills the needs of gnome. In particular the solution used by elogind to deal with cgroups is to just disable them entirely, or at least it was last time I checked. I don't know what runit does for cgroups but a good step would be to make elogind compatible with that.
elogind is a stub piece of systemd and systemd refuses to make any commitment to maintain compatibility. It's like saying that windows programs work on Linux, you just have to use wine - it's sort of true for now, but it's not something you can rely on.
> And, there were valid technical reasons to have gnome depend on a login manager, in particular supporting multi-seat securely is very difficult without one. I should also mention that the previous "standardised interface" for this was ConsoleKit which was also written by the same developers as gnome and systemd.
I remember multi-seat working fine long before either systemd or ConsoleKit, so that seems pretty questionable.
> I would advise those projects to put their money where their mouth is and either start making improvements to elogind, or develop a new login manager that better fulfills the needs of gnome.
"The needs of gnome" are a constantly moving set of goalposts under the control of RedHat. Gnome worked fine long before systemd and systemd has not noticeably improved it (if anything the opposite); there was no technical consensus that the current hard-dependency was necessary, it was forced through because RedHat wanted it that way. So they're not going to accept patches to offer compatibility with non-systemd, and if they do then they'll just find a different way to hard-depend on a different part of systemd.
What you could do is to reduce unnecessary interdependencies. And where there is inherently interaction between separate packages, use a stable interface and publish the standard so that alternative implementations can replace a single package in a standard way without breaking several others.
I'm talking about all the things that now break not related to the normal function of init at all.
