Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: virtual/libudev

[Michael Mol]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 10:06 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Michael Mol <mikemol@×××××.com> wrote:
>> Walter Dnes (very active over in gentoo-user) has put a lot of work
>> into testing and documenting mdev as an alternative for udev. There's
>> been a good deal of success there, up to and including it working with
>> GNOME 2. The work's been documented on the wiki:
>> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
>
> Unless you plan to stay on Gnome 2 forever or fork it you might want
> to consider that Gnome at some point is going to require systemd, let
> alone udev.  Whether that happens or not remains to be seen.
>
> Not that mdev doesn't have its uses, but you're probably not going to
> be running future releases of Gnome on it.

I only mention Gnome 2 as an indicator of an example of system
complexity support achieved. I don't know what's going to happen with
future app interdependency with udev and systemd any more than anyone
else.

What's the generic laconic description of what udev and mdev do?
Hotplug event handler? Is there a significant reason Gentoo shouldn't
support selecting between such handlers? At the point where there's
discussion between using systemd's in-tree copy of udev and a fork of
udev, it seems appropriate to examine the possibility of a more
general selection mechanism.

Admittedly, with increased generality comes increased complexity. I
don't know exactly where increased long-term complexity would come
from, but my first guess would be redirecting where packages dependent
on hooking the hotplug handler place their scripts. Anything else I
can think of sounds more like an up-front effort cost, and not a
long-term one.

-- 
:wq