[gentoo-dev] Re: Suggestion for getting rid of udev

[Duncan]

Rich Freeman posted on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:26:12 -0400 as excerpted:

> My concern with something like dropping udev is that it would make us
> different from every other desktop distro out there.  I'm not aware of
> any distro packaging Gnome/KDE without udev.  Not having Redhat's
> billions to me is a good reason to try to do things the same way that
> Redhat does them - so that we're not re-inventing the wheel.

I'm sure you didn't mean that the way it looks, or next, we'd certainly 
be switching to binary-by-default.

However, you bring up a good point that I've seen repeated in one way or 
another in many discussions about Linux distros and how the compare and 
differ, and in particular, what makes the Linux ecosystem different from 
the Unix ecosystem before it, which ultimately so differentiated that 
each brand was effectively its own OS (as can still be seen in the 
various BSDs today, to some degree, as well as in the surviving 
commercial Unixen, despite POSIX and etc.).

The point as I've seen it repeatedly made, is that what tends to keep the 
various Linuxen compatible is that while each distro does choose its own 
points of differentiation and does indeed differ in those points from 
most others, due to the forces of free/libre and open source, if one ends 
up really better, the others all adapt pretty much the same thing, *AND* 
perhaps more importantly, with f/l/os...

--> Each point of difference requires a significant
--> investment of time and energy from a distro's devs
--> that they could otherwise avoid.

That economy of efficiency forces distros to choose the points of 
distinction they REALLY value, and work on them, while in other areas, 
it's much more efficient to just go with the mainline flow, because being 
different requires WORK, both to achieve, and to maintain, especially at 
FLOSS development speed.

(Of course, a subpoint can be mentioned as well, that in an all-volunteer 
community distro such as gentoo, to a rather large degree, the amount of 
resources the distro chooses to devote to any potential point of 
differentiation, depends on what individual developers choose to push as 
their own personal projects, and the degree to which they can motivate 
other devs and non-dev community volunteers to work with them toward that 
goal.)

Thus, the point I'd make and that I believe you were making is not that 
Gentoo can't be different, or we'd obviously be doing a binary distro 
like everyone else, but that we pick the differences which we value 
enough to develop and maintain, and while the customization that building 
from source allows is one of them, gentoo's not known as a "no-udev" 
distro now, and making it so by default is in practice going to cost 
resources that we simply don't have, so it's extremely unlikely to happen.

But gentoo /does/ value the ability of the administrator to make that 
sort of choice for themselves, and gentoo would not be gentoo, if it 
didn't try to preserve that choice where possible given development 
resource constraints, because that is one of the points of 
differentiation that gentoo has always focused on.  Individual apps and 
indeed, whole desktop environments, may require udev, but that doesn't 
mean the gentoo machine admin isn't free to choose alternatives that 
don't require it.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman