[gentoo-dev] Re: Any official position from Gentoo about systemd, mdev and udev-static ?

[Vaeth]

> I doubt that most people consider udev's stand-alone build-time a big
> issue.

The real issue is not the build-time but the dependencies needed
at build-time (and in future versions perhaps also at run-time):
Currently, these are essentially libcap and dbus.

Now that some projects (e.g. hardened and overlayfs) plan to use
extended attributes systematically, there is probably no other
way for most users than to enable them on for file systems.
In this case, it is a security issue (KISS principle) to have
libcap installed.

dbus alone is not a security issue yet if you do not have any *kit
listening to it, but judging by the previous behavior of upstream,
I would not be surprised if in the not-so-far future they will
invent a reason to make *kit or even essential gnome libraries a
build-time (or even run-time) dependency - of course, making
this dependency non-optional like they do now with libcap and dbus.

Currently, Gentoo is the only distribution which can provide
the user a possibility to run a decent system without bloat
by means of useflags.
If upstream wants to undermine this freedom and if there is
a possibility to give the choice back to the user by an udev virtual
supporting the fork, I think that Gentoo should take this route:

Gentoo now can show its real strength, because it is one of the
few distributions which have technically the ability to leave
the choice between gnome os and traditional linux to the user.

If later on the divergence between the udev implementations is
too high and nobody works on a compatibility layer, some
dependencies on the non-virtual udev might be introduced.

This is not worse than the situation which we have currently where
also several packages cannot be used if e.g. *kit should be
avoided.