The eudev project launches

Posted Dec 18, 2012 17:53 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: The eudev project launches by hummassa
Parent article: The eudev project launches

It is not just the distributions that have to deal with it. It is also developers and ISV vendors and so on. It affects the entire ecosystem. forks in system components often have a serious cost. systemd isn't a fork and you are utterly silly if really think Fedora, SUSE, RHEL, Arch Linux etc are switching to it because of OS X envy.

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The eudev project launches

Posted Dec 18, 2012 20:12 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Forks in system components have a serious cost if they have ABIs or APIs on which a lot of things depend, and if those APIs diverge. Neither of these things are true of udev/eudev, and udev's constant churn and endlessly changing requirements is *already* having a serious enough cost on a lot of people that we have ceased updating some time ago. I am personally glad that some development is being done by people who care about the cost of upgrade to people who may not have Fedora's resources or Fedora's apparent happiness with breaking booting every five minutes when upgrades happen.

It doesn't hurt you, and it helps others. Why are you so opposed?

The eudev project launches

Posted Dec 18, 2012 20:29 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Someone asked why forks can be a problem and I answered that. The concerns over eudev are quite different and has been thoroughly addressed already. Let's not rehash that here.

The eudev project launches

Posted Dec 20, 2012 15:01 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

> Forks in system components have a serious cost if they have ABIs or APIs on which a lot of things depend, and if those APIs diverge.

I agree, but I also define the ABI as pretty much the entire consumer-visible behaviour of the stack, rather than what's in a header file. Even if you do a straight like-for-like reimplementation, you're bound to end up with subtle differences in behaviour that will trip up unsuspecting users.