Err, things like upower existed as independent projects before systemd. But now upower is just a wrapper around systemd-logind (of all things).

Okay, I just looked into this. upower used pm-utils upstream. According to upower devs, pm-utils was a dead project, so they switched to what was working, systemd[1]. I'm not sure specifically why pm-utils was discontinued, but given that the page says it's stuff for HAL, and other things I found in my search note that HAL was being discontinued, I think that's likely a reason. Note: pm-utils looks to have not been actively developed since at least late 2012. That's as far as I went back in the mailing list archives to find something indicative of that[2]. The last release was in July 2010. I can see why projects that relied on it wanted to migrate to something better, or at least maintained. Also note that pm-utils was a collections of shell scripts that ran different commands, such as mount, etc, and echo'd values into the proc filesystem. That may have also influenced decisions one way or another.

1: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/devkit-devel/2015-Dec... (upower was previously called DeviceKit, according to their site, which is why it's the devkit-devel mailing list).

2: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pm-utils/2012-March/0...

No longer developed because of lack of manpower, because manpower moved to systemd (i keep seeing the same names show up over and over), or because pm-utils were basically done bar some odd hardware quirk or other (in the end hardware is analog, so quirks will happen no matter what)?

I can't shake the impression that user space devs are deathly afraid of their project going "maintenance", and thus either abandon it or depreciate it for a new take on the same problem space (that in turn gets to the same point etc etc etc).

> No longer developed because ... pm-utils were basically done bar some odd hardware quirk or other ... ?

I doubt it's this one. There's one or two messages to the mailing list each month or two month about a bug in some chipset or another.

> I can't shake the impression that user space devs are deathly afraid of their project going "maintenance", and thus either abandon it or depreciate it for a new take on the same problem space (that in turn gets to the same point etc etc etc).

Or perhaps it was an underserved portion of the ecosystem, and the people maintaining it left, or decided they wanted in on what systemd was doing, and as project eventually (5+ years later!) swicth away from it to the next (only?) thing which should get new features, being actively developed, that just happens to include systemd. You can either see that as "systemd is eating everything" or "systemd filled a need, and projects had been waiting for that". Whichever one is more true probably requires a deeper look into the details, but that people assumed it was the former (IMO because of mob mentality, not because of any careful thought on the details), that's the story that survives unless someone spends some effort to refute it.

I just wish there was some official announcement on the pm-utils list, and not just this "its dead Jim" on the upower list when people inquire about continued support.

As for people still reporting bug, that does not contradict my mention of "maintenance". Pm-utils may well have been feature complete, and whacking bugs introduced by new hardware would then file under maintenance.

All in all it feels like non of the decisions are being made on the lists, and rather being decisions either via direct emails or via corporate channels.