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

[Alexis Ballier]

On Mon, 8 Feb 2016 10:08:22 +0100
Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote:

> Ohey,
>
> I've opened a bug at:
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=573922
>
> The idea here is to change the order of the providers of virtual/udev.
> For existing installs this has zero impact.
> For stage3 this would mean that eudev is pulled in instead of udev.
>
> The rationale behind this is:
>
> * eudev is an in-house fork, and there's more than a dozen distros
> already using it by default that are not us. Which is a little bit
> weird ...

IMHO the in-house fork thing is rather an argument to keep udev :)
the # of other distros using it is a rather motivating argument
and proves it is not in-house anymore though

> * Both udev and eudev have pretty much feature parity, so there won't
> be any user-visible changes

This is only a necessary condition.

> * udev upstream strongly discourages standalone udev (without systemd)
> since at least 2012


Here I think it'd be nice to have feedbacks from udev maintainers:
How much of a mess is it to support standalone udev? If maintaining
standalone udev means patching like mad, or having to build the
whole systemd just to dosbin udevd, then it is much less clean than a
proper fork and a good argument for eudev.


I'm still using udev because this is the kind of things I don't like
to change everyday and I initially didn't believe much in eudev's
sustainability. I've been proven wrong for the latter. IIRC one of eudev
goals was to be more portable and, e.g., not force very recent kernel
versions to be able to boot, which suits better Gentoo since kernel &
userland are decoupled. That'd be a +0.5 for eudev being default from
me.


Alexis.