On Fri, 5 Aug 2016 18:55:04 +0200
Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:

> Le 05/08/2016 13:28, richard lucassen a écrit :
> > Anyone here running vdev? I just looked around a bit, but there
> > seems to be little activity:
> >
> > https://git.devuan.org/unsystemd/vdev/activity
> >
> > And anyone running good old MAKEDEV here?
> >
> > R.
> >
>

>      No news from Jude for almost one year :-(

>

>      I'm partial time reading documentation and sources and
> considering rolling my own hotplugger, simpler than vdev - Jude has
> done an enormous work and vdev is a complex software with hundreds of
> scripts, too complex for me.

Reading between the lines, I think you're suggesting that instead of
making something completely udev compatible, you make a simpler program
that does a subset of what udev does, perhaps in a different way, and
that Devuan change a few other things that interact with devices so
that it works.

If my understanding is correct, my response is "works for me!"

If we need Jude's level of intellence and understanding to maintain
vdev, which I understand will be when finished plug-compatible with
udev, well, guys like Jude are hard to find, making vdev maintainers a
single point of failure.

More at the bottom...

[snip]

>

>      For this reason, I'm tempted to clone mdev and only change the
> way it is invoked. mdev is spawned for every uevent through the 
> /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug mechanism; instead I would prefer one 
> long-lasting daemon reading uevents from netlink. The design of mdev 
> makes full sense for embeded devices, but not for others.

>

>      I'm sure mdev is very well written, because it has been written, 
> maintained, and reviewed by highly skilled professionals. I have also 
> found a netlink reader at Skarnet, which is certainly written with
> great care but does not seem very usefull since it just forwards the
> uevents to standard output as they come; but It might be instructive
> to look if it uses any special trick to read the netlink.

>

>      Any suggestions are welcome - there are still a lot of devices I 
> don't know anything about.

>

>      Didier

Hi Didier,

If you could actually get this done, you'd be carried through the
streets in a tickertape parade. There are a few challenges...

Read https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev . mdev means no Gnome allowed,
and neither KDE nor its apps allowed. That don't cross my eyes none, I
banned all KDE software from my computers in 2012, and I haven't used
Gnome since they went to the lame Gnome3. But a lot of Devuaners use
KDE and Kmail, and we all know that somehow, K3b managed to be the best
GUI optical disk burner in the world. These are challenges that must be
overcome.

More troubling is the article says LVM might not work with mdev.
Replacing Gnome and KDE is just a matter of prioritizing "works" over
"pretty" and "drag and drop". But LVM is integral to computer use. I'd
say the "might" in "might not" needs investigation.

ON THE OTHER HAND, the existence of all these gotchas prove the problem
with submission to poetterism. Might Lennart someday insert halloween
code that precludes the use of dmenu or Openbox? If a Linux civil war
is necessary, now is probably better than later.

Reading
https://wildanm.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/mdev-mini-udev-in-busybox/ ,
mdev seems to be a part of Busybox. I heard it through the grapevine
that Busybox can now boot GUID partitions (or whatever they're called).
A lot of people are less than thrilled with Grub2. Hmmmm.

SteveT

Steve Litt
August 2016 featured book: Manager's Guide to Technical Troubleshooting
Brand new, second edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mgr