Gentoo Developers Fork udev

In October, Linus Torvalds expressed concerns that udev was making "...changes that were known to be problematic, and are pure and utter stupidity." Several Gentoo developers were also concerned about the removal of features and uncooperative nature of udev maintained by the systemd developers, so they've announced a fork: "After speaking with several other Gentoo developers that share Linus' concerns, I have decided to form a team to fork udev. Our plan is to eliminate the separate /usr requirement from our fork, among other things. We will announce the project later this week." The project name (for now) is udev-ng, and you can grab the code from Github. Update: 11/16 21:29 GMT by U L : One of the developers commented that this isn't yet an official Gentoo project (but hopefully it will be!). There's also an informative flamewar about the fork on debian-devel.

Thumbs down on the name

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a nice way to treat a project that you've used up to now. Udev isn't gone or obsolete. A fork isn't "-ng". Compete on merit, not marketing.

Re:Thumbs down on the name

[icebike]

Nice doesn't enter into it.
I owe no loyalty to crappy implementations simply because I used them before.

Lots of software wanders off the reservation from time to time and needs to be replaced, or forked back to a point in time where it was working well. If the Dev's won't listen to Linus, what other choices are there?

Re:We have not made an official announcement yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to thank Gentoo for not accepting this buggy piece of crap called systemd and all the unholy sh-- it depends on. It's great that there are still people left who have a good understanding how Unix(oid) is supposed to work.

just call it udev

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you just call it udev.

I like systemd, logind, and journald. But I take serious issue with the fact that they're pulling all of these logically distinct things into the same repository. There's no difference with udev. The innovation is good, but what happened to the Unix philosophy?

Udev should never have been pulled into the same source tree. If there was a lot of code overlap, then it should have been put into a library that both udev and systemd can depend on.

So, forget the -ng. The systemd guys will probably be happy enough calling theirs "systemd-udev" or "udev-systemd"

Re: Yes Lennart Realy is that Loony

[segedunum]

If you see a project that Lennart Poettering is involved in...............run for the hills. Seriously. There have been many fits of insanity with PulseAudio (something that has set desktop Linux audio back years) and systemd is such a departure from traditional Unix system administration it's just ridiculous. That might not be a completely bad thing is done carefully but this guy is full of his own self-importance and just cannot see the lunatic path he's on. Ulrich Drepper has similar 'issues'.

Seriously, how can you break something so fundamentally that worked for so many years?

Re: Yes Lennart Realy is that Loony

[segedunum]

.....In the long and broken road to PulseAudio broken Linux drivers are a very recurring theme.................

Re:Systemd really that bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Answered with no evidence (or even really an example) to support your claim? Oh internets. How exactly, as in practical terms, have they 'branched out too far'? I don't think its perfect by a long stretch but there are serious practical gains to using systemd for servers that require custom configuration and can't rely on stock implementations, saves me time so I guess I'm happy with that.

Great plan by udev/systemd

[zzyzyx]

This whole idiocy is intended to force modules devs to actualy do nothing during init so that udev/systemd can advertise faster boot up times.