On 03/14/2012 19:37, Greg KH wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 07:27:07PM -0400, Richard Yao wrote:
>>>> 3. Why not let the users choose where these directories go and support
>>>> both locations?
>>>
>>> Because a plethera of options is a sure way to make sure that half of
>>> them don't work over the long run.
>>>
>>> We aren't Debian here people, we don't support "everything" :)
>>
>> Gentoo provides far more options than Debian does, so this seems
>> somewhat contradictory to me.
> 
> Not really, I don't think we support systems without udev anymore,
> right?  And we get away with a lot of these different "options" at
> compile time, which makes it easier than what Debian has to handle, so
> perhaps it's not a fair comparison.

I already looked in the tree and nothing really stands out as a suitable
replacement for /dev management.  mdev might, but it's part of busybox and
not standalone as far as I know (at least, we don't have an independent
package for it).

For my simplistic setups, I apparently only need udev just to setup the
networking interfaces, because Linux has never created /dev/lo or /dev/ethX
(nor does it even support them).  Thus, CONFIG_DEVTMPFS can't set those up
at all.  If I could find a small utility that was like udev and which took
care of that one little element, I think I'd be able to boot my systems up
just fine.

Is it futureproof?  Not really.  I imagine plugging USB mass storage devices
into a udevless system might be problematic.  Food for thought.

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@g.o
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic