On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 06:28:08AM +0100, Steven J Long wrote

> <dberkholz> who's going to either "port" udev as necessary, or maintain an 
> old version forever?
> <Chainsaw> I will keep an old version going until the end of time.
> <Chainsaw> dberkholz: My plan is to patch reasonable behaviour back into 
> udev, and going with the upstream releases as long as it is feasible.

  I use busybox's mdev, and it works fine for my simple system.  See
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev  The busybox web site is
http://busybox.net/ and the maintenance is handled by them.  The mailing
list info is at http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox

> To confirm again, that this is about without initramfs:
> <dberkholz> sure i can. maintain old udev-XXX forever, put an elog in new 
> udev that says "if you want separate /usr without initramfs, install old 
> udev, mask new, or whatever"

  systemd and udev are being merged into one tarball.  For the "foreseeable
future", it will still build 2 separate binaries.  What happens down the
road if/when it all becomes one combined binary?

> And again, I ask: if it were *not* about running udev without an
> initramfs, then why would anyone even be discussing the possibility
> of patching or forking?

  Forking/patching udev would be a major undertaking.  Maybe we'd be
better off making add-ons for mdev to provide missing udev functionality.
Note that busybox is intended for embedded systems, and they're not
going to add major additional functionality to the base code.  That's
why I suggest optional add-ons for any additional functionality.

  BTW, how would a non-programmer (at least not C programmer) like me
forward these ideas to the Gentoo Council?

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@...>