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

[Lennart Poettering]

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.

> 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.

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?

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.