Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Suggestion for getting rid of udev

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 10:16 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:
> Thus, the point I'd make and that I believe you were making is not that
> Gentoo can't be different, or we'd obviously be doing a binary distro
> like everyone else, but that we pick the differences which we value
> enough to develop and maintain, and while the customization that building
> from source allows is one of them, gentoo's not known as a "no-udev"
> distro now, and making it so by default is in practice going to cost
> resources that we simply don't have, so it's extremely unlikely to happen.

Yup, that was basically what I was getting at.  We need to pick our
battles.  Being so different that we have to patch half of our
upstream packages to work with our userspace is just creating a mess.

It is bad enough that we have to patch half of our upstream packages
because they don't know how to make decent build systems.  :)

>
> But gentoo /does/ value the ability of the administrator to make that
> sort of choice for themselves, and gentoo would not be gentoo, if it
> didn't try to preserve that choice where possible given development
> resource constraints, because that is one of the points of
> differentiation that gentoo has always focused on.  Individual apps and
> indeed, whole desktop environments, may require udev, but that doesn't
> mean the gentoo machine admin isn't free to choose alternatives that
> don't require it.

I couldn't agree more.  Certainly if anybody running an mdev system
finds that some tweak to another package makes their life a lot easier
and it doesn't otherwise increase the distro's maintenance burden a
great deal, then they should submit a patch.  Much of the power of
Gentoo is that it gets out of the user's way when you want to do
things differently.

I think it will be a while before we see an mdev profile, however.

Rich