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

[Alec Warner]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 11:22 AM William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 09, 2020 at 06:40:07PM +0200, Thomas Deutschmann wrote:
> > On 2020-08-08 20:51, William Hubbs wrote:
> > > What do people think?
> >
> > Like others already asked: What's the reason for this?
>
>  Like others have said on the thread, the reason for the switch away
>  from udev in the past was mostly fear driven instead of fact driven. As
>  already said, if the udev developers were going to make udev unusable
>  without systemd they would have by now.
>
> > What do you expect from this change?
>
>  I expect Gentoo to use, by default, what most of the Linux community
>  uses for device management.
>

"I expect Gentoo to use, by default, what most of the Linux community uses
for init management." So we should make the systemd profile the default? :)


>
> > Is there a problem when new Gentoo installations will use EUDEV by
> > default? Or is there a benefit if new installations would use
> sys-fs/udev?
>
> Please look back at the history of why we switched away from udev. It
> was not technical. Udev did not cause any wide scale distro breakages.
> It was because some folks were very loud about a possible systemd
> consppiracy around making udev not work without systemd.
>

You asked me on IRC "how do I convince people" and part of that is to make
it easy to agree with your argument! Asking me to read a bunch of crap
isn't going to make me want to agree; its going to make me say "your
argument is poorly formed, please go away."

 - Link to the things you want me to read.
 - Summarize them so I don't have to read a 100 message long thread from 5
years ago.
 - Make an argument!

---
"I think we picked eudev as the default because of a concern that udev
would eventually require systemd for operation, you can see this from these
mailing list posts: X, Y, Z."
"The above concern has not manifested itself and I believe udev will
continue to not strictly require systemd init for various reasons (mention
list of cases here."
"Therefore I think we should change the default udev provider from eudev to
udev in the default profiles."
---

This would be what I believe is a understandable argument (provided we had
the links to the previous material.) I'm not saying I agree[0] with it; but
I'd at least understand why you want the change to happen.


> Notice again that I'm not saying we need to lastrites eudev. There are
> cases that have developed for it (mainly non-glibc systems), but I am
> saying I see no justification at this point for it being the default
> distro wide.

William
>
>
[0] I expect that most users who want udev actually also want systemd and
so will simply select the systemd profile itself, and that this choice is
immaterial to most users; so I am for keeping the status quo here.