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

[Mike Frysinger]

On Wednesday 12 October 2011 09:26:12 Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 12:40 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> >  Forking udev is probably not an option.  The udev lead developer is a
> > Redhat employee, and his direction seems to be to drag everybody in
> > Redhat's direction.  Our community doesn't have Redhat's billions.
>
> We should note that RedHat is already spending their billions to make
> dracut smarter, and if initramfs is good enough for RHEL then it
> should be good enough for us if somebody just has to have /usr on a
> separate device and needs some of the fancier udev rules to work on
> boot.  For those who don't need dracut there was already a stated
> desire to provide a simplified initramfs.  And, for less complex
> setups, you don't need it at all.

i don't think this logic is that great.  RHEL/Fedora do a lot of things that 
they consider desirable but which are simply their opinion on the topic.

for a while there, they pretty much forced LVM down everyone's throat during 
the install.  it's been a while since i last installed/maintained those 
distros (thankfully), but their initramfs setups were always way more flaky 
than they should have been and fairly difficult to recover from.

the "firstboot" idea is another great example of "things not fully thought 
through ahead of time".  systemd is a good choice for some, but its desire to 
be Linux-specific and require recent kernels is a limitation.

if you want to use initramfs on your system, you certainly can.  if you want 
to do lvm/whatever rootfs, then feel free.  if you want to run systemd, np.  
you want to add bloat with firstboot, by all means.  but a Gentoo system will 
not require any of these things (unless you choose to customize your own 
system in such a way) regardless of how much money other distros throw at 
their own ideas.

note: i'm not advocating dropping udev by default as i think it's completely 
unrealistic, and unlike the other projects mentioned, has been widely adopted 
across pretty much all distros.  it also doesn't really address the 
*underlying* problem: package rules that require /usr to be mounted.
-mike