Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: switching default udev provider for new systems to udev

[William Hubbs]

Hi Rich,

On Sat, Aug 08, 2020 at 06:22:17PM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 8, 2020 at 4:17 PM Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > With the declared aim from upstream of making udev inseparable from
> > systemd, its not something to be done lightly.
> > That's the entire reason that eudev was necessary.
> >
> > I would want some convincing that it was not another step on the road
> > to Gentoo being assimilated by systemd.
>
> So, I really could care less what the default is since it won't impact
> any of my Gentoo hosts either way, but this seems like a silly reason
> to base the decision on.  IMO it was paranoid years ago when people
> first brought it up.  Now it is even moreso considering that years
> have elapsed without any grand systemd conspiracy being revealed.  If
> their goal was to make it impossible to use udev on its own just to
> mess with the 0.01% of Linux users who don't use systemd but do use
> (e)udev, I'd think they'd have gotten around to it by now, or at least
> they would still be talking about it.
 
 I couldn't agree with you more on this point. I think if they were
 going to make udev impossible to use without systemd they would have
 gotten around to that by now. And, yes, the fear of this was the
 primary reason for the switch when the council voted to change it.

> William - can you actually elaborate on WHY you want to change things?
>  Is there some problem with eudev?  Is it actively maintained and
> generally tracking upstream udev commits (minus whatever they
> intentionally don't want to accept)?
 
 It is maintained primarily by one person the last time I checked, and I
 don't really know what he has included or not included from udev. What
 I can say is that the last release of eudev hit the tree a year ago,
 and I'm not sure about feature parity with udev.

> I'd be curious as to a list of the practical differences between the
> two at this point.  For the longest time the only ones I was aware of
> were the de-bundled build system, and the change in the default
> persistent ethernet device name rule which was made in udev but not
> made (by default) in eudev.  Perhaps at this point there are other
> differences.

The only other one I know of is if you aren't using glibc udev will not
compile, but I'm not even sure that is an issue still.

The way I see it, we switched away from udev because of a fear that
never materialized, and I'm not convinced that we have enough time to
keep it in feature parity with udev which it needs to be to be the
default provider.

I am going to echo again. I am not talking about removing eudev from the
tree, so you would be able to use it if you want. I'm just suggesting
that we should start new systems out with udev.

William