[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Council meeting summary for 3 April 2012

[Steven J Long]

Walter Dnes wrote:

> 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.

Does it handle USB and other media hotplug? That's the real killer for 
desktops. (Running scripts in response to events is another issue, and what 
has led to the udev problem.)

>
>> 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?
>
Well I've read assertions that it will be possible to build udev without 
systemd for distros and users who want it, and this is supposedly a firm 
commitment into the future. Then again, experience doesn't bode well for 
those kind of commitments.

(It's much easier to introduce coupling between software in the same 
package. GregKH has also mooted a tightly-coupled "core" Linux distro, which 
afaict is the same reasoning as GnomeOS, and /that/ sounds like a 
clusterfsck waiting to happen.)
 
>> 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.

The point I was making was that it couldn't even be an issue, _unless_ one 
were talking about an install without an initramfs, since udev with an 
initramfs supports a split /usr.

(That's required for the usr-bin merge to be useful, since the idea is to 
enable snapshotting of all distribution binaries; after years of rubbishing 
any possible reason admins might have for a split /usr, it's now critical to 
a major 'new' feature of Fedora, and all the traditional benefits are 
selling-points of the "new design".)

As for the effort, so long as you don't need udev to create nodes for 
localmount, you don't need an initramfs with either our patched approach, or 
an earlymounts initscript, and now there's vapier's busybox applet to do the 
mounts for you. None of which require any modification to udev, nor 
maintenance of an initrd and the binaries therein.

Regards,
Steve.
-- 
#friendly-coders -- We're friendly, but we're not /that/ friendly ;-)