Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2012-04-03

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Zac Medico <zmedico@g.o> wrote:
> On 03/20/2012 04:23 AM, Tony "Chainsaw" Vroon wrote:
>
>> If it is, newer udev can not be stabled and alternatives should be
>> investigated.
>
> A possible compromise would be to use pkg_pretend to check if /usr is a
> mount point, and die if the user hasn't set a variable or a USE flag to
> indicate awareness that /usr must be mounted early.

I'm avoiding commenting redundant with the whole previous email chain,
but I don't really see this as anything other than a mitigation during
some temporary migration period.  That is, unless you want to keep
udev-171 in the tree for the next 15 years or until the default is
some other replacement without this limitation.

Unless somebody is actually willing to maintain a robust alternative I
don't really see that as a real option.  If upstream moves in one
direction, and nobody is willing to maintain things in a different
state, then you just end up with a system package that nobody wants to
use, and something in an overlay that everybody uses instead that is
beyond these debates.  You can't effectively mandate that people
maintain something in a volunteer organization, unless the effort
involved is very minor.

The Council can of course lend moral support to a particular
direction, but Gentoo will only get there if somebody writes the code.
 Right now I don't see anybody maintaining a robust /usr-less udev
fork yet.  If one existed the Council could easily make one vs the
other default, or ask to have it in the handbook, etc.

>
>> If it isn't, a lot of documentation will have to be
>> updated. (And an alternative should likely still be provided)

I'd say that quite a bit of documentation needs to be updated before
udev is stabilized in any case.

Rich