Distributions

Gentoo's udev fork

The ability to fork a project is one of the fundamental freedoms that come with free software. If a software project is heading in a direction that is less than ideal for its users or developers, a competing version can be created and managed in a more useful manner. Forking has been used to great effect with projects like Emacs, GCC, OpenOffice.org, and XFree86. The most successful forks have specific goals in mind and tend to attract at least a significant subset of the original project's developers. Other types of forks face a harder road. Arguably, a recently launched fork of the udev utility under the aegis of the Gentoo project is of the latter variety.

On November 13, the Gentoo council met to discuss, among other things, how to support systems that are configured with the /usr directory on a separate partition. The meeting minutes show that much of the discussion centered around a new udev fork that, it was hoped, might help to solve this problem. The existence of a new udev fork (now called eudev) within the Gentoo project took some developers by surprise, especially when the associated README file was observed to claim that it was a "Gentoo sponsored" project. This surprise led Greg Kroah-Hartman (a longtime Gentoo developer) to ask what the goals of the fork were. Getting an answer to that question turned out to be harder that one might have expected.

One of the developers behind eudev is Richard Yao; his response really needs to be read in its original form:

After extensive discussion with a lengthy digression on copyright law (the eudev developers removed some copyright notices in a way that drew objections), some of the project's motivations came into a bit of focus. Part of the problem is certainly the increased integration between udev and systemd. Udev is still easily built as a standalone binary, but some people worry that this situation might change in the future; mere association with systemd seems to be enough to provoke a response in some people.

That response carries over to the ongoing unhappiness over the deprecation of /usr on a separate partition. The developers involved claim that this configuration has not been supported for years and cannot be counted on to work. In truth, though, it does work for a lot of people, and those people are feeling like they are having a useful option taken away from them. Whether a fork like eudev can address those concerns remains to be seen.

Beyond that, a recent switch to the "kmod" library for the loading of kernel modules has created a certain amount of irritation; backing out that feature is one the first changes made by the eudev developers. Udev uses kmod for a reason: avoiding modprobe calls speeds the bootstrap process considerably. But Gentoo developers like fine control over their systems, and some of them want to use that control to exclude kmod, which they see as unnecessary bloat or even a potential security problem. If udev requires kmod, that desire is thwarted, so the change has to come out.

There was also some discontent over the firmware loading difficulties caused by a udev change earlier this year. That problem has since been fixed; indeed, it has been fixed twice: once by loading firmware directly from the kernel, and once in udev. But some developers have not forgotten the incident and feel that the current udev maintainers cannot be trusted.

In truth, a bit of concern is understandable. The eudev developers point to statements like this one from Lennart Poettering:

After reading that, it is natural to wonder if the current udev maintainers can truly be trusted to look after the interests of users who do not plan to switch to systemd. From there, it is not too hard to imagine maintaining a fork of udev as an "insurance policy" against misbehavior in the future.

That said, a better insurance policy might be to establish oneself as a participating and respected member of the current systemd/udev development community. The strong personalities found there notwithstanding, it is an active community with developers representing a number of distributions. A developer who can work within that group should be able to represent the interests of a distribution like Gentoo nicely while avoiding the costs of maintaining a fork of a crucial utility. And, should that strategy fail, creating a fork of udev remains an option in the future.

But nobody can tell free software developers what they can or cannot work on, and nobody is trying to tell the eudev developers that creating their own udev fork is wrong. The situation becomes a bit less clear, though, if eudev is destined to replace udev within Gentoo itself; then Gentoo users may well find they have an opinion on the matter. For now, no such replacement has happened. If it begins to look like that situation could change, one can imagine that the resulting discussion in the Gentoo community will be long and entertaining.

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Brief items

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Distribution newsletters

• DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 483 (November 19)
• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 292 (November 18)

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