

Three of the eudev development team at the FOSDEM presentation At a presentation at FOSDEM 2013, three of the developers behind udev fork eudev, stated that their primary aim in launching the project back in November was to learn something. Dislike for the udev/systemd developers was, as they repeatedly stressed, not the reason for launching the project – it was not a "hate based fork". The developers also noted that their "pet project" was anything but mature and that users foolish enough to use it in its present state could really mess up their systems.

The above represents just a couple of titbits from a generally unstructured and hard-to-follow presentation in which the three developers failed to convincingly describe either their motivation or plans for the udev fork. For example, as a further reason for forking udev they stated that eudev was intended to support systems on which the /usr/ directory was located on a separate partition and was not mounted by initramfs. Udev has supported this setup from its early days. Because there are some known problems with such a setup, systemd has been warning users when booting this configuration since before udev was merged into systemd. When this was pointed out, the eudev developers were forced to admit that the changes required to fix those problems were indeed required in areas other than in udev.



The eudev developers refer to their inexperience in their presentation A few critical questions were raised and accusations made by Greg Kroah-Hartman, Kay Sievers and Lennart Poettering, who had been invited to the presentation by the eudev team, given chocolates and thanked for programming the code on which eudev is based. In addition to these questions, the three eudev developers were also unable to provide convincing answers to many further questions posed by other audience members. A video of the presentation was streamed online. It is not currently available – in previous years the organisers of FOSDEM have posted the videos of streamed presentations on the web in the weeks following the conference.

(djwm)