DeviceKit-disks renamed to udisks

David Zeuthen david at fubar.dk
Tue Dec 1 13:08:06 PST 2009


Hey,

A lot of people have been asking what's up with the name DeviceKit-disks
now that there is no DeviceKit daemon (which was replaced by libudev and
libgudev). I never really was able to give a satisfying answer.

So, after talking to a few of people (I suck at naming so I really need
help here), I've gone ahead and renamed DeviceKit-disks to udisks. The U
doesn't really mean anything - it could mean Userspace, Unix, Uberkool
but also Useless and Ugly. 

FWIW, I originally wanted to go with the name "xdg-disks" or
"disks" (see, I do need help with naming). Then, Martin (or Scott?)
suggested udisks as it's more catchy and also closer to udev. Plus it's
a real name and not something that is easy to confuse. I really like
this name a lot as it groups us together with udev and the whole gospel
that Kay, I and others have been singing, e.g. 

http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/talks/Plumbers-2009-Sievers-Zeuthen-Replugging-The-Modern-Desktop.pdf

with the rambling about subsystem daemons.

In the process I also reindented all the code (I really prefer GNU style
these days. No, please don't ask. Thanks.) since all the types needed
renaming as well.

Also, I've changed the version numbering as described here

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/devkit-devel/2009-October/000479.html

and documented the ABI stability policy in README. I've also ported the
new-ui branch of gnome-disk-utility to this new ABI (~200 line patch
compared to +30K for udisks). This branch now requires udisks >= 1.0.0
and udisks < 1.0.0. I suggest vendors do the same with packages.

For distros, I expect the transition to be relative smooth. And I expect
future ABI breaks (not that there will be a bunch of them) will be easy
to handle with the new version numbering.

I will rename bugzilla and git soon - currently I have no plans to
rename the mailing list.

I believe Richard has similar plans for DeviceKit-power.

Thanks,
David




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