Re: udev fork

Paul Bender
2012-09-13T02:43:36Z

On 9/12/2012 10:49 AM, sickmind@lavabit.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I know that many people do not like the way udev development went
> recently, therefore we have a systemd-free fork of udev. At the moment
> most of the changes (except for systemd integration) have been ported,
> and no stability issues are noticed. I hope it will be useful for those
> who don't like systemd being pushed in their systems.

First, I believe that the overhead of maintaining a systemd+udevd
configuration that allows disabling of all systemd dependencies is
relatively trivial. Therefore, not doing so (especially when others are
submitting patches to help it along) is the height of seppuku
arrogance/laziness on the part of the systemd+udevd development team.

Having said this, as the maintainer of MiniMyth, I have found the
disjoint nature of sysvinit and udev to be cumbersome in a world of
hotplug hardware that requires starting/stopping userspace daemons or
changing userspace configuration. I (and I imagine others) have found
hotplug requires combining of init that starts/stops services and udev
that can trigger what services need to be started and stopped. In order
to solve this problem for MiniMyth some years ago, I wrote my own custom
sysvinit and udev scripts that make it work for MiniMyth. However, this
has been a kludge. If the tighter integration of init and hotplug makes
this more simple over time (and this is a big if and often change makes
things more complicated), then I believe there value.

However, for systems that do not need hotplug (of which there are many),
requiring the overhead of systemd at either build or run time is a bad idea.

This is just my opinion based on my experience. Take it or leave it.