William Hubbs posted on Sat, 25 Feb 2012 11:25:55 -0600 as excerpted: > On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 08:44:39AM +0000, Duncan wrote: >> You are however correct that it'll be on most systems, at least with >> udev-181, since udev won't build without kmod, now. (I found that out >> when the build broke on me due to missing kmod, as I've had udev >> unmasked for awhile and got 181 before kmod was added as a dep.) > > But, one thing about kmod is that you can turn off the command line > portions of it completely on a monolythic system since udev just uses > the library. That is actually the main reason we are transitioning over > to kmod. > > You do that by putting the following in /etc/portage/package.use: > > sys-apps/kmod -compat -tools
Good point, and I'd done exactly that. But current docs and @system assume modules, and on principles of least change for both packages and docs, I kept that assumption. For advanced users with monolithic kernel systems, kmod as a udev dep and modutils removed from @system will at once be already better and worse than current state, better, since a package.use entry is way less drastic than a package.provided and an @system negating packages files entries, worse, since previously, no modutils package was necessary at all once the appropriate portage configs were setup, but now, kmod is required for udev, as an upstream choice made for us. package.use can take care of the command line stuff, but the package is still a hard dep, since udev itself won't build without it. Unless of course upstream udev provides a build-time option allowing udev to be built without module support, so it doesn't link kmod at all. I've not actually investigated that, but I doubt they do. It would sure be nice, tho, if they did. Has a request been made, at least? Gentoo could then expose that option as a USE flag in the routine fashion, which would make killing the kmod dep entirely possible, for those who do have monolithic kernels. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
