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

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 12:40 AM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org> 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.

My concern with something like dropping udev is that it would make us
different from every other desktop distro out there.  I'm not aware of
any distro packaging Gnome/KDE without udev.  Not having Redhat's
billions to me is a good reason to try to do things the same way that
Redhat does them - so that we're not re-inventing the wheel.

Gentoo is still a fairly meta distro and if users want to remove udev
they probably can do it without a great deal of hassle if they don't
want hot more hotplugish experience and don't use the big desktop
environments.  It just doesn't make sense to make that a default.  In
the same way I don't mind a list of CFLAGS that spans 3 lines but I'd
never advocate putting that into the default make.conf.

Rich