Re: [ANNOUNCE] udev 125 release

[David Zeuthen <david@fubar.dk>]

(Resent, this time with the correct address for linux-hotplug)

On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 16:56 -0400, Doug Goldstein wrote:
> Firstly, there's an inherit symlink that occurs anyway so there is no 
> ABI breakage. And secondly, Kay has clearly stated that these are 
> private rules for udev and udev alone. They ship with udev and are 
> replaced only by udev. 

Hardly. Kay said

> but we suggest to move things which are not supposed to be changed
> by users/admins to the private rules directory.

Now please explain why on earth 3rd party packages would use the
directory /etc/udev/rules.d instead of /lib/udev/rules.d? If they did
they would suffer from exactly the same problems as Kay is trying to
solve for udev. It just doesn't make sense to consider /lib/udev an
implementation detail only. There in lies madness.

> If any package uses them in anyway other then 
> through proper udev mechanisms, that package is broken and relying on
an 
> unstable "ABI". If you can even consider files which are private to a 
> package which shouldn't be edited to be an Application Binary 
> Interface... 

It seems like you thought I wrote "/lib/udev/rules.d" instead of
"/lib/udev". Please read my mail again. FWIW, some packages on my Fedora
system (bluez-utils, initscripts among others) already put stuff
in /lib/udev and I bet it's similar on most distros.

> I believe that was a bit of a stretch to use those terms.

Not at all. But I don't really want to discuss this with you. Let's
instead just query Kay about whether it's fine to consider /lib/udev as
an ABI, e.g. in particular whether it's fine for 3rd party packages to
drop files in /lib/udev and /lib/udev/rules.d. Kay?

      David