On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 6:09 AM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@...> wrote:
>> Goodbye desktop users then.
>>
>> We recently dropped HAL. Now all the magic that was done by HAL (and
>> required udev anyway) is done through udev directly.
>
>  My system worked just fine before HAL was introduced, thank you.  I
> always had sys-apps/hal and sys-apps/dbus in /etc/portage/package.mask
> and my system continued to work just fine, thank you.

This is not about *your* system, it's about the general Gentoo
community systems. And in most cases, the functionality that mdev
provides is not even a fraction of what udev can do, like it or not.

I have a pair of bluetooth headphones; I turn them up and set them to
pair with something, and gnome-shell in GNOME 3 right away asks me if
it's OK to pair with them. I say yes, and the headphones are
immediately available in the desktop; thanks to PulseAudio, I can
transfer all my apps (or only some of them) to the headphones, without
even needing to pause the streams.

All of this without a single modification to a config file. It just
works. And that is thanks to udev (among several other pieces of the
stack).

mdev is designed for embedded systems (like busybox). By design it
cannot handle of the cases that udev handles, and so it is not suited
for a general purpose distribution like Gentoo. If you wan to try to
use it, that's your right of course. But don't ask the Gentoo devs to
do the work for you; do it yourself. And be aware that anyway the devs
will choose to stick with udev (like many have already said), because
they have to think about the general case, not an arbitrary particular
case.

Just the .02 ${CURRENCY} from an old Gentoo user happy with systemd,
dracut, udev, dbus, GNOME 3, and other really cool new technologies.

Regards.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México