Re: [gentoo-user] udev update

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 9:20 AM, Tanstaafl <tanstaafl@×××××××××××.org> wrote:
> On 11/10/2014 8:21 AM, Francisco Ares <frares@×××××.com> wrote:
>> Checking the news (eselect news read), I see that an upgrade to udev-217
>> might break firmware loading, so the news tagged
>> "2014-11-07-udev-upgrade" says that a kernel >= 3.7 should be configured to:
>>
>> CONFIG_FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER=n
>>
>> Is it that simple?  Trying a new kernel build using "menuconfig", it
>> says that CONFIG_FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER depends on CONFIG_FW_LOADER, and
>> this one depends on a huge list of other configuration elements.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>
> Ueah... UGH... thanks Lennart/systemd devs for yet another thing to have
> to worry about...
>

From the kernel config instructions (something not written by the systemd devs):
This option enables / disables the invocation of user-helper
(e.g. udev) for loading firmware files as a fallback after the
direct file loading in kernel fails. The user-mode helper is
no longer required unless you have a special firmware file that
resides in a non-standard path. Moreover, the udev support has
been deprecated upstream.

Announcing a feature as deprecated and later dropping it is hardly
controversial.  You chose a distro that gives you a choice of things
like your udev implementation and your kernel implementation (or using
udev at all), and as a result you get to deal with the fact that some
versions of the one have constraints on how you use the other.  If you
ran a distro like Ubuntu you wouldn't have to worry about any of this,
as you'd use the udev they gave you and the precompiled kernel they
gave you and the world's greatest desktop environment and you'd be
happy with it.  Anybody who has run Gentoo for a long time knows that
from time to time some change comes along and you'll just have to deal
with it - you can't just ignore things like firmware-loading on Gentoo
the way you can with some other distros.

Of course, nothing prevents anybody from creating a preconfigured
kernel for Gentoo.  There is genkernel of course, though I think we
probably could do better.  Most seem to be happy just managing their
own kernel configurations, and I think that is why nobody has bothered
to spend much time perfecting a canned kernel.

Going back to the original question, yes - it is that simple.
Dependencies are just dependencies - you only have to worry about them
when you turn things ON.

--
Rich