Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 13, 2008 0:05 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
Parent article: Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Remind me again... didn't a certain CEO of Canonical go out of his way to make a public call
for cross distro collaboration in the last couple of months?  And now, one of his companies
employees is reluctant to change how they are doing things...to aid in cross-distro
collaboration with regard to udev? Perhaps Shuttleworth should send a few more internal
company memos and get his employees on board before his next public challenge to the open
source development community.  I would have thought a Canonical employee would be jumping at
the chance to publically prove that Canonical was really as interested in bringing down the
barriers between distros given Shuttleworth's passion about it previously...even if there are
technical concerns on how to do it right.  

-jef"Walk the walk..if you are going to talk the talk"spaleta

to post comments

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 13, 2008 1:19 UTC (Wed) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (2 responses)

The Ubuntu developer seems to be genuinely interested in an improved set of rules for _all_.

The Debian dev is the only one that doesn't seem to be interested in harmony at all, unless
everyone else does it his way...

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 13, 2008 5:35 UTC (Wed) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (1 responses)

Marco d'Itri is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud - he refused to add /dev/random to the mini-/dev udev uses to bootstrap itself, causing our netbooted machines to hang as NSS-LDAP couldn't get any randomness to start TLS. This is despite /dev/random being in every Linux kernel for years - it's impossible to compile out. It's bug 412328 which I lost interest in when the machines in question started having hardware problems.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 13, 2008 17:21 UTC (Wed) by Wummel (guest, #7591) [Link]

Marco is known to be difficult to deal with, reminding me of Debians Branden Robinson in his
early days (before he calmed down a little bit :-)

Hopefully Marcos contributions to udev will be as fruitful as Brandens efforts with the X
Window System. I'd really like to see some patches exchanged between Debian and upstream
authors.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 13, 2008 10:15 UTC (Wed) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link]

Well, as is made clear in that thread, Remnant has various technical concerns about using the
upstream udev rules. They discuss the problems, but it doesn't seem like they are anywhere
close to a a mutual understanding of the actual issues. So, at this point, I would expect
caution and not immediate enthusiasm for change.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 14, 2008 12:36 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (11 responses)

Stone's Law: In any discussion mentioning Canonical or Ubuntu, when any issue tangentially
related to freedom, contributions or similar is raised, the odds of a non-technical Fedora
person slagging Canonical and Ubuntu off rapidly approaches one.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I'm unbelievably bored of it.  Do you genuinely have
nothing better to do?

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 14, 2008 16:49 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (10 responses)

This is a bizarre comment...  jspaleta has a very good point: Shuttleworth and Remnant
definitely appear to be at odds here.  I don't understand the point you're trying to make.  If
you're so bored of it (what? jspaleta making a point about inconsistency?), you could just
close the window and go do something else yourself.  Why the reply?

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 14, 2008 17:20 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (9 responses)

Mark saying 'we need to be serious about cross-distribution collaboration and grow the common
ground' is a very good thing that I can only hope comes to fruition.

Scott stepping forward with technical concerns doesn't mean he's pulling a Marco d'Itri and
attempting to deny the rest of the world.

Why hasn't Fedora adopted dpkg? Debian's procps? etc.

Just because you have valid technical concerns about one proposal for further
cross-distribution collaboration (and a proposal on how to fix it -- see his blog), doesn't
mean you're completely anti-collaboration.

I posted the comment because I'm absolutely sick of it.  If people want to lambast Canonical
and Ubuntu, there are absolutely valid reasons to do so (cf. gregkh's analysis of their kernel
contributions, or lack thereof), but most of the time I see the Fedora leaders (mainly Jef and
Max, really) speaking about them, it's yet more uninformed and petty bullshit.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 14, 2008 19:27 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (7 responses)

Any package is not in Fedora either because it doesn't meet the legal requirements or somebody
hasn't volunteered to do it. Fedora does have dpkg in the review queue already and procps
(from http://procps.sf.net) is in in Fedora already although I don't have any idea of Debian
has a different fork. Packaging formats are rather uninteresting. What you want to look at is
PackageKit and several other projects developed within Fedora that aid distributions in a
level that makes sense for everybody.  

Btw, syncing on distribution release schedule is different from upstream collaboration and
upstream collaboration has been advocated by Fedora for a very long time

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream

Perhaps you can also learn to differentiate between personal opinions and project view points
too.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 15, 2008 15:10 UTC (Fri) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (6 responses)

Sigh.

Yes, I know that.  I've seen (particularly within X.Org) that Fedora is a fantastic free
software citzen, and its upstream work has been nothing short of amazing.  I also admire and
respect the dedication to software freedom and improving the entire free software ecosystem
that no-one else embodies.  (Honestly, I'd be using it if it actually, y'know, worked.  But
that's another matter.)

It was rhetoric to make a point: just because Fedora have not adopted dpkg as their base
packaging format (not just provided dpkg), does not mean that they're not interested in
cross-distribution collaboration.  Of course, it would be nice if RPM simply ceased to exist,
but that's not going to happen, and that wasn't my point.

My point was that just because you hold back for whatever reason on doing one thing which
would increase cross-distribution collaboration, that you're not completely against
cross-distribution collaboration.  Hopefully that's a reasonable enough statement that
everyone agrees.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 16, 2008 4:48 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)


I don't see what your beef with RPM is. 

In a similar way, if someone makes a opinion, there is no need to paint a broad brush just
because the person also happens to be a Fedora contributor. Again, you need to differentiate
between opinions representative of a project and personal ones.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 17, 2008 0:29 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (3 responses)

He has identified a pattern.  He has requested that the pattern stop.  

This is not an overbroad brush.

It might be wrong, but it is not on its face an overreach.

If you want to see why there are differences of opinion on the virtues of dpkg and RPM you can
just do some simple web searches.  There have been endless threads on the topic.  I don't find
the discussion personally interesting but there are definitely technical differences that
matter in some cases.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 17, 2008 16:38 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

You need citations in order to demonstrate a pattern. I don't see that happening here. I don't
see why someone trying to demonstrate that there is unwanted hostility would want to destroy
his own argument by wanting RPM to completely ceast to exist either. Sure, there are
differences and in some cases there are advantages to each of the solutions too. Remember,
Intel switching from Ubuntu to Fedora claiming RPM to be a reason?

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 17, 2008 16:59 UTC (Sun) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (1 responses)

You continue to miss the point by such an astounding margin that I think it's better if we
walk away and just forget this ever happened.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 18, 2008 13:17 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

If you don't have a point worth understanding, feel free to walk away. I thought you had one
while engaging in this conversation. Good luck.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 17, 2008 12:36 UTC (Sun) by rwmj (guest, #5474) [Link]

Having personally built many many .debs & .rpms over the years, I can tell you that RPM is a lot easier to use and considerably more sane.

Yum, on the other hand, sucks donkey balls compared to apt, although it has been getting better recently ...

Rich.

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 14, 2008 20:31 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

That makes sense.  Remnant's misgivings seem easily solvable...  afict, he just needs upstream
to make groups work for initramfs, and upstream sounds amenable to those changes.  That would
be most excellent.

I'll try not to let Marco d'Itri's "elegance" windmill-tilting skew my interpretation of SJR's
comments.  :)

Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

Posted Aug 15, 2008 6:06 UTC (Fri) by jbailey (guest, #16890) [Link]

Canonical employees aren't whipped into speaking the party line, y'know.. =)

There's healthy room for discussion around an idea - Scott's spent a huge amount of time
tweaking the startup and shutdown times of Ubuntu systems.  It wouldn't surprise me if Ubuntu
now relies on some udev tweaks that aren't in upstream.  I'm sure that it will, like other
distros, eventually settle into the mold. But Ubuntu usually doesn't do that too quickly. =/

 - Jeff "former Canonical employee" Bailey