Re: [gentoo-dev] News item for eudev deprecation

[Jaco Kroon]

Hi All,

We run glibc based systems.  No musl.  But we don't use systemd.

As little as a year back we still ran into issues with systemd-udev
variant breaking systems, the fix of course was to nuke it and install
eudev.  Are we certain there is nothing (eg, LVM integration was our
biggest problem resulting in really crazy impossible to debug since we
can't log in due to lvn snapshot creation/removal deadlocking with
systemd-udev - no ask me not how, all I can tell you is that eudev never
exhibited this behaviour) will break?

Whilst I fully appreciate the difficult of all the various e* packages
(elogind, eudev etc ..) and I most certainly do not have the capacity to
maintain, and therefore I'm in full support of the concept of
deprecating eudev, I'm very, very worried about us suddenly being back
into the reboot-a-server-a-week scenario.  In the worst case we've lost
some large filesystems almost certainly due to systemd-udev (we've had a
number of filesystem crashes which was recovered with fsck, but after
ditching systemd-udev and moving to eudev about two years back on this
specific host we've had ZERO further problems other than a failed drive
or two, none of which required a hard-reset to get back to a sane state).

Kind Regards,
Jaco

On 2021/08/22 22:14, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Yes!  It is time to finally deprecate eudev!  sys-fs/udev now builds
> under musl!  My original purpose for maintaining eudev was because
> systemd + musl did not play well together when udev was absorbed into
> the sytemd repo.  Now thanks to patches from openembedded, they do, and
> my original reason for maintaining eudev is no longer valid.  So its
> time to retire eudev.  It has served its purpose as a stop-gap.
>
> To me, this is a success for musl, and I would like to thank all the
> developers who have taken musl seriously enough to make this happen :)
>
> I am willing to transfer the eudev repo to another organization, but I
> will not maintain it anymore and Base System doesn't want to either.
> Let me warn people, to maintain it correctly you MUST become familiar
> with its internals and watch what systemd is doing upstream to keep up.
>  This is not trivial.  I learned a lot from eudev, and it did save musl
> on gentoo, but there was a period there when it was taking up almost all
> of my time.  If you don't know what you're getting into, you don't want
> to take on its maintenance.
>
>
>
> Title: eudev retirement on 2022-01-01
> Author: Anthony G. Basile <blueness@g.o>
> Posted: 2021-08-xx
> Revision: 1
> News-Item-Format: 2.0
> Display-If-Installed: sys-fs/eudev
>
> sys-fs/udev is becoming the standard provider of udev on non-systemd
> (e.g. OpenRC) systems. Users of systemd will continue to use the udev
> services provided by the sys-apps/systemd package itself.
>
> The transition should be uneventful in most cases, but please read this
> item in full to understand some possible corner cases.
>
> eudev will be retired and removed from Gentoo on 2022-01-01. We will
> start masking eudev on 2021-10-01 and give people 3 months to prepare
> their transition. You should ensure that sys-fs/eudev is not in your
> world file by running
>
>   emerge --deselect sys-fs/eudev
>
> in order for Portage to replace eudev with sys-fs/udev once the
> package.mask is in place. We fully support udev on musl, whereas uclibc
> will still have to rely on eudev before also being removed on 2022-01-01.
>
>   **WARNING**
>
> If you happen to have an INSTALL_MASK with a blanket "*systemd*" glob,
> you will inevitably break your system. sys-fs/udev contains "systemd" in
> some of its filenames, hence a blanket filter rule will likely lead to a
> non-functional udev installation.
>
>   Rationale
>
> The integration of udev into the systemd git repo introduced numerous
> problems for none-glibc systems, such as musl and uclibc. Several
> options were considered, and the one chosen was to fork and maintain
> udev independant of the rest of systemd. This was meant as a stop-gap
> solution until such time as the problems with systemd on musl had been
> resolved. This is now the case with patches provided by openembedded,
> and my original reason for maintaining eudev is no longer relevant.
>
> I am willing to transfer eudev to another umbrella organisation or Linux
> distribution that is willing to continue its maintenance, but
> maintaining eudev cannot be done purely through proxy-maintaining and
> requires an understanding of its internals. This is a steep learning
> curve and must be an earnest effort. For this reason, the Base System
> project has decided not to support euev as an option going forward.
>