I've always found this part particularly hilarious/misleading in retrospect:
"For one, in the last stages of GNOME 3.8.0 as release team we specifically approved some patches to allow Canonical to run logind without systemd. Secondly, the last official statement still stands, No hard compile time dep on systemd for “basic functionality”. This is a bit vague but think of session tracking as basic functionality."
It's now the position of the systemd developers that running logind without systemd was never supported, and that distros like Ubuntu should never have tried to do it. I believe they've now broken the ability to do so. It's one of the major reasons Ubuntu had to switch to systemd.
"For one, in the last stages of GNOME 3.8.0 as release team we specifically approved some patches to allow Canonical to run logind without systemd. Secondly, the last official statement still stands, No hard compile time dep on systemd for “basic functionality”. This is a bit vague but think of session tracking as basic functionality."
It's now the position of the systemd developers that running logind without systemd was never supported, and that distros like Ubuntu should never have tried to do it. I believe they've now broken the ability to do so. It's one of the major reasons Ubuntu had to switch to systemd.
(Oh, and for some context, http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/logind/ is the logind DBUS API. Good luck reimplementing that!)