Comment 18 for bug 765735

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 01:04:44PM -0000, Mark - Syminet wrote:
> TL;DR please give your users an exact explanation as to why you made
> plymouth such a strong dependency.

This explanation has been given repeatedly in bug reports. Which just goes
to show why launchpad bugs are the wrong place to give such explanations,
because nobody reads them. But ok, I'll try once more.

The misunderstanding here is that you are viewing plymouth as a "boot
splash". It is not. It is a boot-time I/O serializer. This is an absolute
requirement on a system with a fast event-based boot like upstart, because
without it you can never reliably interact with the system at boot time -
interaction that's needed for processes like fsck, and cryptsetup. You have
one console, and N fscks that may be running in parallel, and you need to be
darned sure that your keypresses are controlling the right process.

That's why having fsck spit output directly to the console is not a suitable
solution. And the fact that the display of the plymouth splash screen can
be toggled at runtime is why having a config file to control where mountall
sends it output is not suitable either.

Now, in addition to multiplexing we also care about users having a
nice-looking boot experience, which is why the graphical splash is the
default (and has been since long before plymouth was around) and most of the
engineering work has been around making the graphical experience work
smoothly. This unfortunately means that some things don't work as well when
using the details plugin - such as this issue described here. But that's a
priority because of server, not because desktop users might opt out of the
graphical splash when it's working.