Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Changing order of default virtual/udev provider

[William Hubbs]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 09:52:29AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 9:27 AM,  <waltdnes@××××××××.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 12:09:58AM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote
> >> On 09 Feb 2016 22:39, Duncan wrote:
> >> > Mike Frysinger posted on Tue, 09 Feb 2016 14:26:52 -0500 as excerpted:
> >> > > On 08 Feb 2016 13:46, Micha?? Górny wrote:
> >> > >> I'm strongly against this, because:
> >> > >
> >> > > agreed.  i also don't see any reasons in Patrick's e-mail to suggest the
> >> > > current default is inadequate.  "i don't like upstream" isn't relevant.
> >> >
> >> > I'd agree, except that the way we're running udev is strongly discouraged
> >> > and generally not supported by upstream, with a statement that it /will/
> >> > break in the future, it's simply a matter of time.
> >>
> >> start a thread then when that actually happens
> >
> >   The problem with that approach is that all at once the Gentoo forum
> > will be hit with questions by a whole bunch of people who will have to
> > migrate to either eudev or systemd on a short deadline.  As the old
> > saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  I believe
> > that the best way to handle a crisis is to prevent it in the first
> > place.  That means getting into a lifeboat before standalone udev sinks.
> >
>
> What would force them to migrate all at once?  Even if udev-229
> doesn't work standalone, udev-228 will work standalone forever, and
> patches could always be backported if there were some security crisis.
>
> By all means change the virtual if it is the right thing to do, but I
> don't think that we should treat this as some kind of risk that could
> cause problems for us without warning.  Most likely if a need to
> abandon it comes up we'll have months of warning, with still-working
> versions of udev not even marked stable yet in the pipeline.
>
> As I said earlier, the advantage of procrastination is that you can
> make a choice later when you have better information or perhaps even
> more choices available.  Maybe by the time udev stops working
> standalone everybody has seen the light and is now using libredev
> anyway.
>
> Often the decision to procrastinate is a decision that is rewarded.
> That should be considered carefully.

+ 10000.

I also saw another issue that made me shudder. If we change the default
to eudev, people who are running separate /usr are going to think they
can kill their initramfs's, because people in gentoo conflated the
separate /usr and initramfs issue with udev [1].

William

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=573760#C4