[systemd-devel] killing udev for non-systemd systems

[William Hubbs]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:52:10PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Tue, 14.08.12 13:01, William Hubbs (w.d.hubbs at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > > (Yes, udev on non-systemd systems is in our eyes a dead end, in case
> > > you haven't noticed it yet. I am looking forward to the day when we
> > > can drop that support entirely.)
> 
> > You have taken a piece of software which is important to many linux
> > systems (udev) and merged it into an init system (systemd) which is not
> > used everywhere for a number of reasons. Now you are planning to kill
> > udev for systems that do not use systemd. Why is that? Why are you
> > saying that udev on non-systemd systems is a dead end?
> 
> "looking forward to" is not "planning to". I'd appreciate if you
> wouldn't twist my words.

I didn't intend to twist your words; I was just looking for a
clarification. Maybe I should have worded this differently; sorry about
that.

> > Is there some alternative for non-systemd systems?
> 
> We support running udev on non-systemd systems just fine. We will
> continue to do so for some time, as long as there are enough reasons to
> keep it (for example, relevant distributions need it). But eventually,
> when those reasons are gone we'll drop it. And that's as specific as
> I'll get. There are no plans beyond that.
 
 Ok, that's cool.

> And yes, I do believe that systemd is the way to go, and not
> sysvinit. That's why I said "in our eyes non-systemd systems are a
> dead-end" when it comes to udev. What do you expect me to say? Something
> like "sysvinit is technically state of the art and has a bright future"?
> Or maybe "openrc is awesome technological design and is what everybody
> will use 5y from now"? Or maybe "Upstart is the most excellent current
> design I have ever seen and is going to take the world by storm"? Nope,
> not gonna say anything of that, simply because I don't believe anything
> of that. I believe these are dead-ends, in particular
> technologically. Would you expect me otherwise? A maintainer who doesn't
> believe in his own project is probably not a good maintainer, is he?
 
 Of course not. I'm just concerned about the status of udev since it was
 merged into systemd.

 I understand that your priority is going to be that it works well with
 systemd, but the rest of your msg sounded pretty harsh toward any
 issues that non-systemd users would have with udev in the future, if
 they are not issues on systemd systems.

> Oh, and one of the fantastic things about Open Source is actually that
> it matters little what we think upstream and what we support upstream
> and actually work on upstream. It's Free Software, you can take what you
> like, and leave what you don't, and you are not dependent on upstream
> for that. You can get any revision of upstream stuff, and you have the
> freedom to use it, to improve it, to maintain it. This is a fantastic
> freedom, since it means nobody can shove anything down your throat, you
> are empowered, you can make decisions, and you own the code as much as
> upstream does.
> 
> Lennart
> 
> -- 
> Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.
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