[arch-general] Gentoo udev fork w/o systemd

[Patrick Lauer]

On 11/20/12 08:48, Daniel Micay wrote:
[snip]
> The issues with a separate /usr were internal gentoo ones. Their
> initramfs tool is not yet capable of mounting it,
Wrong.
And the actual problem are the users that do not want an initramfs -
things booted without one the last few decades, why add some machinery
now that doesn't improve anything? (I mean, we could boot before, so
what's the *feature* we gain ?)

> and their libkmod
> package installed files to /usr (which has since been changed). That's
> also the reason they removed the libkmod and libblkid support, but
> since the standalone tools like modprobe still link against those
> libraries there was no actual change in dependencies - just a few
> hundred extra processes spawned at boot.
Also a misunderstanding - the eudev fork was more of a research project.
Part of figuring out how things work is removing the things that are not
essential - that doesn't mean there's an intent to permanently remove
the capability.

> Note that they're rolling
> back those changes now, and are just going to make them "optional"
> dependencies instead (but they will still be required, you can just
> fork processes instead of calling library APIs).
> 
> They also dropped the goal of "POSIX compatibility", and are just
> aiming to reduce "gnu-isms" instead even if it means bringing back
> race conditions.
"They" being a few people with wildly varying goals. Making things
build-able without a full gnu toolchain is just a good idea to some and
insanity to others ...

> Gentoo is still using udev v171, and lots of the people assumed that
> they couldn't be using up-to-date udev versions without systemd as
> init. However, Arch managed to do that without any trouble, so it's
> another non-reason for the fork.
It's the regressions that force us to an old version, not the systemd
stuff that's screwed on for no apparent reason. Same reason debian is
currently "stuck" with the last known-good version.

> 
> Also, please keep in mind that this is not (yet) an official Gentoo
> project, it's just a project done by a Gentoo developer so he gets to
> use their infrastructure. It is definitely not supported by all Gentoo
> developers (Greg KH being one of the vocal opponents, along with
> several other core developers).
> 
Thanks for pointing this out - this is a few people scratching an itch,
and I think none of us wants to take over the world at the moment :)