Mick wrote:
I've flirted with Slackware before I came over to Gentoo and the reason I chose Gentoo is because it gave me more freedom to built and configure an OS exactly as I wanted it. I was at the time thinking of trying BSD with portage, but when I was keeping an eye on it there was this start/stop development as Alan mentions and loads of packages were unstable for yonks or missing completely. This made me decide to stay on Linux. I don't think we should give up completely yet. Perhaps we need to lobby a bit more effectively (Can we email directly the dev(s)? Where do they live? Ha, ha!) PS. Dale please don't leave! There'll be no mammoth threads without you and who are we going to rely to trash the credibility of packages - HAL springs to mind! Come to think of it, given HAL's demise can you also please have a go at udev? You never know ... ;)
Well, this is me. I like things simple. I have built my own computers. I have rebuilt car engines, small mower engines, worked on about every machine, except heavy equipment such as a crane, and done well. What I don't do is add unneeded junk to something. This init* stuff is one of them. If a person wants to use it, then fine, by all means use it. Thing is, this is going to affect a lot of people in a negative way. When I first installed Mandrake and didn't know a lot about Linux, I had /usr on a separate partition. As ignorant as I was, I knew it was a good thing to do. I clearly wasn't thinking when I put /usr on / when I did this install. Maybe the excitement of my new rig got the better of me. lol
I have to admit, hal got on my bad nerve. Thing is, I could at least boot up to fix it. Console was still working. If this init* thing breaks, I can't even do that. Trust me, I'm going to be super duper pissed if this init thing fails. I won't care why. The point is, I don't want the thing to begin with and it shouldn't even be needed. There are better ways to do this.
From my understanding, the dev is not listening. That is another thing that bothers me. When devs stop listening to users, that causes a problem. Remember hal? How many people complained early on about the config files? Lots. I also don't like that a very few people or just one person can make a decision like this that will have a negative affect on a LOT and I mean a LOT of users. That is something that needs to be dealt with. What I would like to see is this, a good stable alternative that works well with a proper fix and for that to push udev out and render it null. I think that would serve the dev right. Listen to the people that use it or people will use something else. The mdev package comes to mind here. Maybe this will push it to take udevs place. It seems there is enough people that opposes this. If a few commercial and paying people can help, it may just be the next better thing.
Dale :-) :-)
