[arch-dev-public] [arch-general] [signoff] udev-145-1

[Roman Kyrylych]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 16:46, Dan McGee<dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Jan de Groot<jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
>> On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 15:47 +0300, Roman Kyrylych wrote:
>>> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 14:13, Daenyth Blank<daenyth+arch at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 04:39, Roman Kyrylych<roman.kyrylych at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> >> I don't really understand why minimal .25 kernel is a problem?
>>> >> Aren't we the bleeding edge distro?
>>> >>
>>> > For some virtualized providers (slicehost off the top of my head),
>>> > they use their own kernel that isn't as up to date. This update would
>>> > break all such hosted Arch servers.
>>>
>>> IgnorePkg?
>>> And how often are such hosted Arch servers updated anyway?
>>> And we do not support custom kernels officially anyway.
>>>
>>> What I'm trying to say is that holding updates because of this is not
>>> acceptable IMO.
>
> I didn't say "holding updates", I just wanted to either find a
> workaround if available so as not to break user systems completely.

I didn't mean you said that. My second sentence was more general.

>> Sidenote2: This udev bump from minimal kernel version from 2.6.22 to
>> 2.6.25 (mandatory) because use the signalfd(). An announce required?
> Wowzers, I'm not so sure we want to do that.

We don't have a choice (at least I don't see it).
I mean - suppose we patch udev to not use signalfd so it runs on 2.6.22
(which is a very bad idea IMO, but let's suppose)
- we will have to bump our minimal kernel requirement at some time anyway,
so I don't see a benefit in trying to workaround the version bump.

I think people who use old kernels know what they are doing,
and are smart enough to check the list of updates
and read newsitems on the main site (which we should post about this)
I don't think anyone blindly runs -Syu on a production server via ssh.

> Ever had to rescue a remote server because sshd didn't come up?

I don't understand what your example has to do with this (udev vs sshd).

>
> Not supporting custom kernels *officially*? Of course. Not supporting
> custom kernels? Did something change in the past 4 years that I
> missed? I thought Arch was always a bit of a DIY distro, it's rather
> shortsighted to assume one kernel fits everyone...

I didn't mean we should support only the latest and greatest default kernel.
Rather I meant that we don't provide official out-of-the-box support
for running on quite old or heavily customized kernels,
so some user changes may be required,
like in this case - adding udev to IgnorePkg
until the hosting provider will update their kernel.
I think such server could safely use old initscripts and udev
and only update the required software like apache
(due to security issues or bugfixes).


P.S.: Since text cannot transfer intonation, I'd like to notice that
my comments in this thread are by no means flaming.
Just expressing some thoughts.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)