Didier:
...
>     I disliked dbus even before people spoke of systemd and I'm afraid
> dbus becomes some day the way to force systemd on us.  I'd like to drop
> it right away, but my usual DE (xfce) uses it.

I don't know much about dbus, what is good/bad with dbus ?

>     But I'm modestly and slowly working to escape it: I'm writing a
> little application to monitor hot-plug storage in a GUI, of course
> without dbus, but also without libudev and/or gvfs. I'm almost done -
> now trying to make sense out of a gtk2 tutorial. I also have a few ideas
> to replace udev by a script, provided devtmpfs is enabled in the kernel.

Since nowadays the kernel can provide devtmpfs, what is the role of
udev et al apart from handling usb devices ?

Regards,
/Karl Hammar