Is gentoo still about choice?

[stefan11111]

Some rather important changes have been forced upon gentoo users in the last week.
Eudev and opentmpfiles are being last-rited and masked for removal.
Both of these make it even harder for people to not use anything subsumed by systemd and they needlessly restrict choice.
Eudev is maintained upstream, it recently got 2 new volunteers downstream and is fit for plenty of use cases.
With opentmpfiles, there is even less reason to remove it. The work is already done. All that needs to be done it to keep it in the tree. It takes more work to remove it now that to keep it in the tree.
To me, this looks like we have been divided and conquered enough that finally conquering all systemd opposition is possible.

So this brings me to the question in the title. Is gentoo still about choice?
_________________
My overlay: https://github.com/stefan11111/stefan_overlay
INSTALL_MASK="/etc/systemd /lib/systemd /usr/lib/systemd /usr/lib/modules-load.d *udev* /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d *tmpfiles* /var/lib/dbus /usr/bin/gdbus /lib/udev"

[NeddySeagoon]

stefan11111,

You don't understand how Gentoo is organised. Nor do most of the posters in the eudev last rite topic in the -dev ML.

Quite simply, Gentoo really isn't organised at all.
It's a collection of volunteers doing their own thing, all building on the work of others.

About the only 'organisation' is the Gentoo council, that determines what happens if one project wants to do something that impacts others.
Even then, only if the projects cannot reach agreement among themselves.

Gentoo devs are not paid to work on Gentoo, they do what interest them, when it interests them.
There are a small number of devs that are paid by their employers to work on Gentoo doing the employers bidding because said employers use Gentoo in their businesses.
Sometimes that work gets into the ::gentoo repo, other times its kept in the employers local overlay.

If this lack of organisation gives an illusion of choice, that all it is. An illusion.
We have several init system because devs re interested in maintaining several init systems. There is no organisation behind that.

Nobody is interested in maintaining eudev in the ::gentoo repo and more, so its being removed.

The Gentoo is about choice mantra has never been true. Gentoo is about what the contributors are interested in. It really is that simple.
There are no conspiracies - Gentoo does not even have the organisation for that.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[matthew2]

Can somebody explain why they'd choose eudev or opemtmpfiles today? Maybe I'm a bit behind, but aren't they just outdated forks now? I saw the hellthread (100+ emails ) in gentoo-dev and do not understand the rationale.

[stefan11111]

[NeddySeagoon]

stefan11111,

eudev was forked from systemd sometime after it had swallowed udev. udev was its own project at one time.

opentmpfiles was split out of openrc.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[Zucca]

I'll just leave these tmpfiles related links here:

• https://github.com/juur/tmpfilesd
• https://github.com/eweOS/pawprint
• https://github.com/KenjiBrown/hardenedtmpfiles

stefan11111,

you still have the choice.

_________________
..: Zucca :..

[GDH-gentoo]

[stefan11111]

[GDH-gentoo]

[NeddySeagoon]

GDH-gentoo,

If you need to ask, you really don't want to know. :)

The First Post this time round, is there.
eudev has been last rited before. It got a reprieve as a new upstream took it on.

-- edit --

Its all been said in that ML thread. Several times. Its pointless different people discussing it all again here.
... unless its to put a team together to do the work to keep eudev as a viable alternative to udev.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[GDH-gentoo]

Found it, I didn't realize that archives.gentoo.org is not updating anymore

EDIT: Huh, I'm surprised by Arsen's e-mails. He's still listed as an "active team member" upstream and Boian is waiting for his review... Does he know ?
_________________

[Ralphred]

[pietinger]

I do not understand this thread. Why ? Imagine I go to my bank advisor and tell him to give me 100,000 euros. He would certainly understand that as a bank robbery. Because he would never get the idea that I want to have the money "just like that" only as a gift.

What our developers (and all who do something for gentoo) do is a gift. No one is obligated to do anything they don't want to do - because they don't get paid for it. There is no contract and no salary.

How idiotic is it to ask someone: Give me something ! Because I want it !

I myself am a moderator because I want to give back something I have received - as a gift. It was my decision to accept the offered task. If someone should say tomorrow, I should be more often in the forum to fulfill my task even better, it could be that I say:

I do not have to do anything !

I would like to quote here again Ralphred (thanks for your great post) and mark the most important thing:

Gentoo allows as much choice as possible for new users, constrained by the resources available.

Resource means people who are willing to give away their time (and knowledge) for free. If these people no longer have time (or desire) to give something away, then one should say:

"Thank you for doing it earlier. It is a pity that you stop, but of course it is your life. Thanks again."



I would like to take this opportunity to dedicate the last sentence to a great developer, who today - unfortunately - said he no longer had so much time for the forum.

[pjp]

[stefan11111]

[pingtoo]

[stefan11111]

[Hu]

What work are you duplicating? The developers have ceased supporting those packages and done all the required work to make things stop allowing them as a dependency. If you're duplicating work, it's because you're not copying the work the developers are doing. It reads to me like you are complaining that the developers aren't supporting something you want supported, and now you're being expected to support it yourself or switch to something they will keep supporting for you. It is a bit unfortunate that you need to put in a small amount of work to migrate off the package they abandoned, but that beats doing the ongoing continuous work of maintaining the package in an overlay.

This ties back to what pietinger said above: they were volunteering their time to maintain some packages you liked. They have now decided not to volunteer more time maintaining these packages (eudev, opentmpfiles) because they are not getting enough value out of continuing to do so, in part because with upstream unavailable, the time requirement for maintaining the package increases substantially.

[pjp]

[pingtoo]

[stefan11111]

[fedeliallalinea]

[pietinger]

[sMueggli]

[sam_]

Please see my previous remarks in one of these threads.

I'm also generally interested in ideas wrt making overlay development a bit easier.