On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 10:16 PM, Duncan <[email protected]> wrote: > Thus, the point I'd make and that I believe you were making is not that > Gentoo can't be different, or we'd obviously be doing a binary distro > like everyone else, but that we pick the differences which we value > enough to develop and maintain, and while the customization that building > from source allows is one of them, gentoo's not known as a "no-udev" > distro now, and making it so by default is in practice going to cost > resources that we simply don't have, so it's extremely unlikely to happen.
Yup, that was basically what I was getting at. We need to pick our battles. Being so different that we have to patch half of our upstream packages to work with our userspace is just creating a mess. It is bad enough that we have to patch half of our upstream packages because they don't know how to make decent build systems. :) > > But gentoo /does/ value the ability of the administrator to make that > sort of choice for themselves, and gentoo would not be gentoo, if it > didn't try to preserve that choice where possible given development > resource constraints, because that is one of the points of > differentiation that gentoo has always focused on. Individual apps and > indeed, whole desktop environments, may require udev, but that doesn't > mean the gentoo machine admin isn't free to choose alternatives that > don't require it. I couldn't agree more. Certainly if anybody running an mdev system finds that some tweak to another package makes their life a lot easier and it doesn't otherwise increase the distro's maintenance burden a great deal, then they should submit a patch. Much of the power of Gentoo is that it gets out of the user's way when you want to do things differently. I think it will be a while before we see an mdev profile, however. Rich
