[gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 08:02:07PM +0100, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> Handling separate /usr support
> ==============================
> WilliamH requested approval for two methods to support separate /usr
> systems[2].  The discussion is closely related to recent opinons on udev, such
> as e.g. [1], because the main reason to force a system without separate /usr
> during boot is to allow newer versions of udev to be used.
> The originally announced item of discussing the removal of gen_usr_ldscript
> has been retracted[4].
> - approve/disapprove plan (forcing everyone to take action, and
>   implement one of the two "supported" solutions)
> 
> WilliamH requests a council vote to allow migrating everyone after bugs
> [5,6,7] are resolved.  He proposes a news item to announce this that allows to
> assume after a given period of time that everyone who is using split /usr is
> using a method to mount /usr before boot.  The focus is purely on this topic.
> 
> rich0 prefers to move on until suport for separate /usr becomes a
> barrier, and handle things from there.  This allows for alternative
> solutions to be developed and put forward.  He favours waiting somewhat
> to see developments of the udev fork.
> 
> Chainsaw is a strong proponent for waiting a month and see how the new
> udev fork develops itself.  If within a month no solution is provided by
> the udev fork, things need to be moved forward in WilliamH's proposed
> way.
> 
> scarabeus approves the plan.
> 
> betelgeuse likes to ensure users won't be caught off guard, but has no
> preference for any direction taken in particular.
> 
> graaff's main concern is how the problem is tied to udev, or not.  A fork of
> udev may not change the situation regarding separate /usr, hence delaying a
> decision now is not sensical.  Opt-in system for people to ensure they can
> boot is pre-requisite.  If this cannot be ensured, we have to wait.
> 
> grobian disapproves the plan, since there will be systems that cannot easily
> be changed to ensure /usr being mounted at boot, and it is no good to expel
> users of (security) updates just because of that.  With the use of a special
> profile (masks/unmasks, variables and/or use-flags), users that want to move
> on, can opt-in to getting packages that require non separate /usr.

So, that's a nice summary, but, what is the end result here?

I see an "entertaining" fork of udev on github at the moment (-ng,
really?  What happens when someone wants to fork that, -ng-ng?  Be a bit
more original in your naming please, good thing I never trademarked
"udev" all those years ago, maybe I still should...)

The commits so far in that repo are fun to watch for a variety of
reasons, none of which I should repeat hear less I get a bunch of people
mad at me :)

But, along those lines, what is the goal of the fork?  What are you
trying to attempt to do with a fork of udev that could not be
accomplished by:
  - getting patches approved upstream
or:
  - keeping a simple set of patches outside of the upstream tree and
    applying them to each release

I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?  And is
something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of a working
udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes, it is a
regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of more
processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)

As I posted elsewhere, working on a project based on "hate" only lasts
so long.  I should know, that's the reason I started udev in the first
place over 9 years ago[1].

You need to have a real solid goal in place in order to be able to keep
this up in the long-run.  Otherwise you are going to burn yourself out,
and end up alienating a lot of people along the way.

Oh, and if _anyone_ thinks that changing udev is going to "solve" the
"no separate /usr without an initrd" issue, I have a bridge I want to
sell them.

thanks,

greg k-h

[1] Long story, best told over beers, take me up on it the next time you
    see me, I'll buy.

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 07:29:22PM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> I see an "entertaining" fork of udev on github at the moment (-ng,
> really?  What happens when someone wants to fork that, -ng-ng?  Be a bit
> more original in your naming please, good thing I never trademarked
> "udev" all those years ago, maybe I still should...)

Heh, ok, it's been renamed to "eudev" now, that's a bit better, but not
much.  Odd vowel choice.

Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
attributed to.

Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.

Please fix this now.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/17/2012 10:39 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
> that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
> under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
> should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
> least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
> attributed to.
> 
> Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
> radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
> know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.
> 
> Please fix this now.

klondike discussed the copyright branch changes with robbat2 before they
started and there was no problem at the time. We have retained all
copyright notices and looking at the branch, I find nothing objectionable.

Would you mind joining us in IRC to discuss your concerns?


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:06:38PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 11/17/2012 10:39 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
> > that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
> > under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
> > should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
> > least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
> > attributed to.
> > 
> > Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
> > radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
> > know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.
> > 
> > Please fix this now.
> klondike discussed the copyright branch changes with robbat2 before they
> started and there was no problem at the time. We have retained all
> copyright notices and looking at the branch, I find nothing objectionable.
To note here, since I was CC'd directly:
I said changed files should get the modified notice, as Gentoo should have
copyright on the changes that are explicitly new by Gentoo. I didn't say to add
it to every file in the repo (but I will admit that I didn't tell him not to
either).

I'll state it clearly what should be the case:
- the s/systemd/eudev/ line, and insertion of "From prior code in systemd and
  pre-systemd udev" being added now is fine.
- WHEN substantial changes are made to an existing file, the copyright
  attribution should be amended to include the Gentoo Foundation. The
  attribution should NOT be changed before this. Better text given the existing
  wording would be:
  Portions Copyright 2012 Gentoo Foundation.

- Files that have no copyright notice should NOT be touched until such time as
  a major addition is added to them.

http://dpaste.com/832634/ is what I approved with klondike (his 2nd paste to me
in the discussion).

Copying out of the pastebin so we have a permanent record.
> Original:
> /***
> This file is part of systemd.
> 
> Copyright 2011 Lennart Poettering
> 
> systemd is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
> under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
> the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or
> (at your option) any later version.
> 
> systemd is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
> WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
> MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
> Lesser General Public License for more details.
> 
> You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
> along with systemd; If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
> ***/
> 
> Modification:
> 
> /***
> This file is part of eudev.
> From prior code in systemd and pre-systemd udev.
> 
> Copyright 2011 Lennart Poettering
> Copyright 2012 Gentoo Foundation
> 
> eudev is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
> under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
> the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or
> (at your option) any later version.
> 
> eudev is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
> WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
> MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
> Lesser General Public License for more details.
> 
> You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
> along with eudev; If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
> ***/




-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Developer, Trustee & Infrastructure Lead
E-Mail     : robbat2@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11ACBA4F 4778E3F6 E4EDF38E B27B944E 34884E85

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/17/2012 11:28 PM, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:06:38PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> On 11/17/2012 10:39 PM, Greg KH wrote:
>>> Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
>>> that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
>>> under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
>>> should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
>>> least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
>>> attributed to.
>>>
>>> Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
>>> radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
>>> know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.
>>>
>>> Please fix this now.
>> klondike discussed the copyright branch changes with robbat2 before they
>> started and there was no problem at the time. We have retained all
>> copyright notices and looking at the branch, I find nothing objectionable.
> To note here, since I was CC'd directly:
> I said changed files should get the modified notice, as Gentoo should have
> copyright on the changes that are explicitly new by Gentoo. I didn't say to add
> it to every file in the repo (but I will admit that I didn't tell him not to
> either).
> 
> I'll state it clearly what should be the case:
> - the s/systemd/eudev/ line, and insertion of "From prior code in systemd and
>   pre-systemd udev" being added now is fine.
> - WHEN substantial changes are made to an existing file, the copyright
>   attribution should be amended to include the Gentoo Foundation. The
>   attribution should NOT be changed before this. Better text given the existing
>   wording would be:
>   Portions Copyright 2012 Gentoo Foundation.
> 
> - Files that have no copyright notice should NOT be touched until such time as
>   a major addition is added to them.
> 
> http://dpaste.com/832634/ is what I approved with klondike (his 2nd paste to me
> in the discussion).
> 
> Copying out of the pastebin so we have a permanent record.
>> Original:
>> /***
>> This file is part of systemd.
>>
>> Copyright 2011 Lennart Poettering
>>
>> systemd is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
>> under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
>> the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or
>> (at your option) any later version.
>>
>> systemd is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
>> WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
>> MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
>> Lesser General Public License for more details.
>>
>> You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
>> along with systemd; If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
>> ***/
>>
>> Modification:
>>
>> /***
>> This file is part of eudev.
>> From prior code in systemd and pre-systemd udev.
>>
>> Copyright 2011 Lennart Poettering
>> Copyright 2012 Gentoo Foundation
>>
>> eudev is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
>> under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
>> the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or
>> (at your option) any later version.
>>
>> eudev is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
>> WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
>> MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
>> Lesser General Public License for more details.
>>
>> You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
>> along with eudev; If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
>> ***/

These changes were made in a branch so that they could be reviewed for
the consequences of such misunderstandings before going into HEAD. I
will let klondike fix the branch. We can review it again after he has
finished.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 04:28:00AM +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:06:38PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> > On 11/17/2012 10:39 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > > Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
> > > that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
> > > under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
> > > should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
> > > least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
> > > attributed to.
> > > 
> > > Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
> > > radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
> > > know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.
> > > 
> > > Please fix this now.
> > klondike discussed the copyright branch changes with robbat2 before they
> > started and there was no problem at the time. We have retained all
> > copyright notices and looking at the branch, I find nothing objectionable.
> To note here, since I was CC'd directly:
> I said changed files should get the modified notice, as Gentoo should have
> copyright on the changes that are explicitly new by Gentoo. I didn't say to add
> it to every file in the repo (but I will admit that I didn't tell him not to
> either).
> 
> I'll state it clearly what should be the case:
> - the s/systemd/eudev/ line, and insertion of "From prior code in systemd and
>   pre-systemd udev" being added now is fine.
> - WHEN substantial changes are made to an existing file, the copyright
>   attribution should be amended to include the Gentoo Foundation. The
>   attribution should NOT be changed before this. Better text given the existing
>   wording would be:
>   Portions Copyright 2012 Gentoo Foundation.
> 
> - Files that have no copyright notice should NOT be touched until such time as
>   a major addition is added to them.
> 
> http://dpaste.com/832634/ is what I approved with klondike (his 2nd paste to me
> in the discussion).

That makes sense, but is not what ended up in that commit.  The commit
needs to be removed.

Also, how can any new work be assigned to the Gentoo Foundation?  Is
there an explicit copyright assignment happening somewhere that I am not
aware of?

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:06:38PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 11/17/2012 10:39 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
> > that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
> > under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
> > should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
> > least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
> > attributed to.
> > 
> > Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
> > radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
> > know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.
> > 
> > Please fix this now.
> 
> klondike discussed the copyright branch changes with robbat2 before they
> started and there was no problem at the time. We have retained all
> copyright notices and looking at the branch, I find nothing objectionable.

Seriously?

Look at the comment I made on that commit for details, but here it is
again:

You can not claim copyright on a file you did not do one of the two
things:
  - create yourself
  - modify in a "major" manner

Adding a comment at the top saying it is part of the eudev project and
covered under the LGPL2+ does not meet either of these requirements at
all.

By merely importing a file into a new project, you can not claim
copyright on it.  That's the law.  The fact that this was reviewed by
someone makes me seriously wonder about the copyright policies of the
Gentoo Foundation.

Also, you can not assign copyright to a third party, unless you have a
copyright assignment form.  Do the developers doing this work have such
a form assigned?  And in what country and state is that form valid for?
Different countries, and states, have different laws here, and
one-form-fits-all is not true anywhere.

So blindly adding a Gentoo Foundation copyright to _any_ file in this
repo, that has not met one of the two above rules, is illegal, and
grounds for opening the Gentoo Foundation up to big trouble.

> Would you mind joining us in IRC to discuss your concerns?

I don't do IRC anymore, sorry.  Email is the best way to reach me.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/17/2012 11:28 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:06:38PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> On 11/17/2012 10:39 PM, Greg KH wrote:
>>> Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
>>> that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
>>> under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
>>> should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
>>> least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
>>> attributed to.
>>>
>>> Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
>>> radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
>>> know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.
>>>
>>> Please fix this now.
>>
>> klondike discussed the copyright branch changes with robbat2 before they
>> started and there was no problem at the time. We have retained all
>> copyright notices and looking at the branch, I find nothing objectionable.
> 
> Seriously?
> 
> Look at the comment I made on that commit for details, but here it is
> again:
> 
> You can not claim copyright on a file you did not do one of the two
> things:
>   - create yourself
>   - modify in a "major" manner
> 
> Adding a comment at the top saying it is part of the eudev project and
> covered under the LGPL2+ does not meet either of these requirements at
> all.
> 
> By merely importing a file into a new project, you can not claim
> copyright on it.  That's the law.  The fact that this was reviewed by
> someone makes me seriously wonder about the copyright policies of the
> Gentoo Foundation.
> 
> Also, you can not assign copyright to a third party, unless you have a
> copyright assignment form.  Do the developers doing this work have such
> a form assigned?  And in what country and state is that form valid for?
> Different countries, and states, have different laws here, and
> one-form-fits-all is not true anywhere.
> 
> So blindly adding a Gentoo Foundation copyright to _any_ file in this
> repo, that has not met one of the two above rules, is illegal, and
> grounds for opening the Gentoo Foundation up to big trouble.
> 
>> Would you mind joining us in IRC to discuss your concerns?
> 
> I don't do IRC anymore, sorry.  Email is the best way to reach me.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h

Thanks for clarifying that. It will be fixed before it goes into HEAD.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:26:41PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> 
> Thanks for clarifying that. It will be fixed before it goes into HEAD.

I recommend deleting the branch and starting over, having that commit
floating around like that could cause trouble.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Petteri Räty]

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On 18.11.2012 6.28, Greg KH wrote:

> 
> Also, you can not assign copyright to a third party, unless you have a
> copyright assignment form.  Do the developers doing this work have such
> a form assigned?  And in what country and state is that form valid for?
> Different countries, and states, have different laws here, and
> one-form-fits-all is not true anywhere.
> 

Finnish law doesn't require transferring author's rights to be done with
a written form. Of course it's prudent to have some kind of a permanent
record about it (you need to be explicit about rights to modify and
transfer to third parties). I agree that this is a complex issue and
best left to lawyers if you want to do a thing like this globally.

Regards,
Petteri



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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:06:38PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 11/17/2012 10:39 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
> > that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
> > under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
> > should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
> > least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
> > attributed to.
> > 
> > Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
> > radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
> > know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.
> > 
> > Please fix this now.
> 
> klondike discussed the copyright branch changes with robbat2 before they
> started and there was no problem at the time. We have retained all
> copyright notices and looking at the branch, I find nothing objectionable.

Why is this getting a Gentoo Foundation copyright in the first place?
Why is that necessary?

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera (klondike)]

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El 18/11/12 04:39, Greg KH escribió:
> Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
> that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
> under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
> should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
> least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
> attributed to.
So I made a mistake coming out from a missunderstanding on a commit on a
branch that didn't even get merged since I was expecting approval from
somebody else before that. Cool. The amount of damage caused by this
action is around the same as publishing a patch and not applying it.
> Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
> radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
> know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.
Check european copyright laws please, they are quite different from
yours. I at least have had to read and understand the spanish copyright
laws a few times and its not funny. So please don't speak of a "normal"
body of copyright law there is not such thing and some of us have enough
with the "normalizations" USA based lobbies are trying  to impose on ours.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

Hey guys,

Just read through this entire thread, and one concern still rings loud
and clear -- what is the purpose of this fork?

The various responses I've read so far are something like:

- Because Linus yelled a lot when udev/Kay broke firmware loading.

Except both Linus and the udev people fixed the problem. Linus added
direct filesystem loading in the kernel [1], and I'm told the udev
folks also fixed their hang and async situation.

- Because udev requires systemd.

Except the patches to build udev without systemd are not very large.

- Because of kmod.

Still required for things, even if its indirectly removed.

- Because we want to have separate /usr working again.

Will udev alone actually fix the separate /usr functionality? What's
required here?

Don't bother responding to the above bullet points, even if they're
garbage. Instead, read on to what I'm really after.


In general, what I'm looking for is some kind of well-written,
well-thought out mission statement, that clearly says "okay here are
the issues, here's generally how we're going to solve them, and here's
why you should feel good about this being a Gentoo project."

At the moment, I haven't found anything like this, and the fact that
it's an official Gentoo project consuming the time and hearts of
intelligent developers makes me concerned, since I'm in the dark as to
its purpose and motivation.

All I'm asking is some kind of coherent mission statement. If the
aggregated responses to the bullet points above are inaccurate, don't
bother responding to those inaccuracies on a point by point basis or
bikeshed on them, or whatever happens on mailing lists. Just, please,
tell everybody what exactly you want to do, why you want to do it, and
what this is all about.

Thanks a lot,
Jason


[1] http://git.zx2c4.com/linux/commit/drivers/base/firmware_class.c?id=abb139e75c2cdbb955e840d6331cb5863e409d0e


-- 
Jason A. Donenfeld
Gentoo Linux Security
zx2c4@gentoo.org
www.zx2c4.com

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/18/2012 11:59 AM, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> All I'm asking is some kind of coherent mission statement.

How can we define a mission statement when we are still in the process
of understanding the codebase, what it does well and what it can do better?

A project announcement should answer your question. The reason we have
not done it is because are still in the process of defining such things.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Matt Turner]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 3:25 PM, Richard Yao <ryao@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 11/18/2012 11:59 AM, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
>> All I'm asking is some kind of coherent mission statement.
>
> How can we define a mission statement when we are still in the process
> of understanding the codebase, what it does well and what it can do better?

Most people would have a reason to fork before forking. Or maybe
mission statement != reasons and we're having a communication
breakdown.

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 05:35:22PM +0100, Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera (klondike) wrote:
> El 18/11/12 04:39, Greg KH escribió:
> > Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
> > that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
> > under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
> > should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
> > least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
> > attributed to.
> So I made a mistake coming out from a missunderstanding on a commit on a
> branch that didn't even get merged since I was expecting approval from
> somebody else before that. Cool. The amount of damage caused by this
> action is around the same as publishing a patch and not applying it.

Not really, having it in the repo worried a lot of people, as it was not
an acceptable thing to do.

> > Come on people, this is basic copyright law, it's not something
> > radically new.  It's something that _all_ software developers should
> > know, either from school, or any company they have ever worked at.
> Check european copyright laws please, they are quite different from
> yours. I at least have had to read and understand the spanish copyright
> laws a few times and its not funny. So please don't speak of a "normal"
> body of copyright law there is not such thing and some of us have enough
> with the "normalizations" USA based lobbies are trying  to impose on ours.

I know all about European copyright laws, and if you do, I am supprised
that you changed the files in this manner, as you really can't give up
your copyright in Europe like you can in the USA.  So by adding the
Foundation's copyright here, a USA-based company, it is quite strange.

Anyway, the commit is gone, which is good, thank you for deleting the
branch.  Please be more careful about doing such things in the future.
We really don't want to get the Foundation in trouble by doing this type
of thing.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Anyway, the commit is gone, which is good, thank you for deleting the
> branch.  Please be more careful about doing such things in the future.
> We really don't want to get the Foundation in trouble by doing this type
> of thing.

Honestly, much of this whole thread really seems too much like prior
restraint for my taste.

Should devs be able to start controversial projects without
permission?  Should devs be able to modify copyright lines in a branch
of a repository?  And so on...

I don't think we should be yelling at people for what amounts to
talking about things, or mocking things up.  If somebody wrote a bot
to go changing things in the portage tree I'd be concerned, but
getting worked up about things that end up in repositories for all of
a day or two is over-reaction.

That said, I don't want to turn away those who have concerns either.
If somebody thinks that something illegal is being done by all means
speak up.  However, the solution is to not go into panic mode, but to
step back, evaluate the situation, and then make the right decision.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/19/2012 02:40 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 05:35:22PM +0100, Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera (klondike) wrote:
>> El 18/11/12 04:39, Greg KH escribió:
>>> Anyway, I now see a _very_ dangerous commit in the "Copyright" branch
>>> that better not get merged into the tree, as it's wrong, and illegal
>>> under all countries that follow the "normal" body of Copyright Law.  It
>>> should be removed right now before someone gets into trouble, not the
>>> least of which would be the orginization that the copyright is now being
>>> attributed to.
>> So I made a mistake coming out from a missunderstanding on a commit on a
>> branch that didn't even get merged since I was expecting approval from
>> somebody else before that. Cool. The amount of damage caused by this
>> action is around the same as publishing a patch and not applying it.
> 
> Not really, having it in the repo worried a lot of people, as it was not
> an acceptable thing to do.

Would you elaborate on who these people are?


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Fabio Erculiani]

In my humble opinion, the real question is: why systemd got merged into udev?
I would love to hear a clear technical reason for that.

-- 
Fabio Erculiani

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:22:14AM +0100, Fabio Erculiani wrote:
> In my humble opinion, the real question is: why systemd got merged into udev?
> I would love to hear a clear technical reason for that.

I recall this was discussed on the systemd mailing list when it
happened, so you might want to look at the email archives there for
details if you are interested.

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/17/2012 10:29 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> I see an "entertaining" fork of udev on github at the moment (-ng,
> really?  What happens when someone wants to fork that, -ng-ng?  Be a bit
> more original in your naming please, good thing I never trademarked
> "udev" all those years ago, maybe I still should...)

That was a placeholder name. If you checked before you sent your email,
you would see that we had settled on eudev.

> But, along those lines, what is the goal of the fork?  What are you
> trying to attempt to do with a fork of udev that could not be
> accomplished by:
>   - getting patches approved upstream
> or:
>   - keeping a simple set of patches outside of the upstream tree and
>     applying them to each release

The goal is to replace systemd as upstream for Gentoo Linux, its
derivatives and any distribution not related to RedHat.

> I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
> binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
> surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?  And is
> something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of a working
> udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes, it is a
> regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of more
> processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)

See the following:

https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/issues/3


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:02:00PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 11/17/2012 10:29 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > I see an "entertaining" fork of udev on github at the moment (-ng,
> > really?  What happens when someone wants to fork that, -ng-ng?  Be a bit
> > more original in your naming please, good thing I never trademarked
> > "udev" all those years ago, maybe I still should...)
> 
> That was a placeholder name. If you checked before you sent your email,
> you would see that we had settled on eudev.

The name change still doesn't make it any less "entertaining" :)

What does the "e" stand for?

> > But, along those lines, what is the goal of the fork?  What are you
> > trying to attempt to do with a fork of udev that could not be
> > accomplished by:
> >   - getting patches approved upstream
> > or:
> >   - keeping a simple set of patches outside of the upstream tree and
> >     applying them to each release
> 
> The goal is to replace systemd as upstream for Gentoo Linux, its
> derivatives and any distribution not related to RedHat.

Wait, really?  You want to replace systemd?  Then why are you starting
at udev and not systemd?

What is wrong with systemd that it requires a fork?  All other distros
seem to be participating in the development process of systemd quite
well, what is keeping Gentoo developers from also doing the same?

What are your goals, specifically, in detail.

> > I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
> > binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
> > surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?  And is
> > something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of a working
> > udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes, it is a
> > regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of more
> > processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)
> 
> See the following:
> 
> https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/issues/3

You moved from an explicit to an implicit dependency.  It's not
inspiring any sense of confidence from me that there is an understanding
of how things work here.

Seriously, the codebase you are working with isn't that large, or
complex, at all.  To go rip stuff out, only to want to add it back in
later, wastes time, causes bugs, and goes against _any_ software
methodology that I know of.

confused,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/17/2012 11:19 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:02:00PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> On 11/17/2012 10:29 PM, Greg KH wrote:
>>> I see an "entertaining" fork of udev on github at the moment (-ng,
>>> really?  What happens when someone wants to fork that, -ng-ng?  Be a bit
>>> more original in your naming please, good thing I never trademarked
>>> "udev" all those years ago, maybe I still should...)
>>
>> That was a placeholder name. If you checked before you sent your email,
>> you would see that we had settled on eudev.
> 
> The name change still doesn't make it any less "entertaining" :)
> 
> What does the "e" stand for?

That is a common question. Someone associated with Canonical suggested
that e stand for embedded. Others consider the "eu" prefix to be the
greek root for "true". Honestly, we don't care. It is just a name.

>>> But, along those lines, what is the goal of the fork?  What are you
>>> trying to attempt to do with a fork of udev that could not be
>>> accomplished by:
>>>   - getting patches approved upstream
>>> or:
>>>   - keeping a simple set of patches outside of the upstream tree and
>>>     applying them to each release
>>
>> The goal is to replace systemd as upstream for Gentoo Linux, its
>> derivatives and any distribution not related to RedHat.
> 
> Wait, really?  You want to replace systemd?  Then why are you starting
> at udev and not systemd?
> 
> What is wrong with systemd that it requires a fork?  All other distros
> seem to be participating in the development process of systemd quite
> well, what is keeping Gentoo developers from also doing the same?
> 
> What are your goals, specifically, in detail.

Is there any way that the answer to your inquiry would result in a
productive conversation where you would not attempt to dictate what we do?

>>> I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
>>> binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
>>> surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?  And is
>>> something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of a working
>>> udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes, it is a
>>> regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of more
>>> processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)
>>
>> See the following:
>>
>> https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/issues/3
> 
> You moved from an explicit to an implicit dependency.  It's not
> inspiring any sense of confidence from me that there is an understanding
> of how things work here.
> 
> Seriously, the codebase you are working with isn't that large, or
> complex, at all.  To go rip stuff out, only to want to add it back in
> later, wastes time, causes bugs, and goes against _any_ software
> methodology that I know of.

I can say the same about the manner in which these changes were
introduced. Ripping them out to get the codebase back into a state from
which we are comfortable moving forward is the only sane way of dealing
with them.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:25:11PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 11/17/2012 11:19 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:02:00PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> >> On 11/17/2012 10:29 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> >>> I see an "entertaining" fork of udev on github at the moment (-ng,
> >>> really?  What happens when someone wants to fork that, -ng-ng?  Be a bit
> >>> more original in your naming please, good thing I never trademarked
> >>> "udev" all those years ago, maybe I still should...)
> >>
> >> That was a placeholder name. If you checked before you sent your email,
> >> you would see that we had settled on eudev.
> > 
> > The name change still doesn't make it any less "entertaining" :)
> > 
> > What does the "e" stand for?
> 
> That is a common question. Someone associated with Canonical suggested
> that e stand for embedded. Others consider the "eu" prefix to be the
> greek root for "true". Honestly, we don't care. It is just a name.

I wouldn't pick "embedded" as the embedded world is now using systemd as
it meets their requirements much better than anything else :)

> >>> But, along those lines, what is the goal of the fork?  What are you
> >>> trying to attempt to do with a fork of udev that could not be
> >>> accomplished by:
> >>>   - getting patches approved upstream
> >>> or:
> >>>   - keeping a simple set of patches outside of the upstream tree and
> >>>     applying them to each release
> >>
> >> The goal is to replace systemd as upstream for Gentoo Linux, its
> >> derivatives and any distribution not related to RedHat.
> > 
> > Wait, really?  You want to replace systemd?  Then why are you starting
> > at udev and not systemd?
> > 
> > What is wrong with systemd that it requires a fork?  All other distros
> > seem to be participating in the development process of systemd quite
> > well, what is keeping Gentoo developers from also doing the same?
> > 
> > What are your goals, specifically, in detail.
> 
> Is there any way that the answer to your inquiry would result in a
> productive conversation where you would not attempt to dictate what we do?

The only thing I'm "telling" anyone to do is to fix the copyright mess
they created, as it is a legal liability for the Gentoo Foundation,
which I care about.  That HAS to be resolved.

I'm genuinely interested in your goals, in detail, otherwise I would
not have asked about them.  Perhaps I am totally wrong and your fork
makes sense, perhaps, to me, not.  But without knowing such goals,
there's no way that anyone can get an idea about this.

> >>> I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
> >>> binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
> >>> surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?  And is
> >>> something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of a working
> >>> udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes, it is a
> >>> regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of more
> >>> processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)
> >>
> >> See the following:
> >>
> >> https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/issues/3
> > 
> > You moved from an explicit to an implicit dependency.  It's not
> > inspiring any sense of confidence from me that there is an understanding
> > of how things work here.
> > 
> > Seriously, the codebase you are working with isn't that large, or
> > complex, at all.  To go rip stuff out, only to want to add it back in
> > later, wastes time, causes bugs, and goes against _any_ software
> > methodology that I know of.
> 
> I can say the same about the manner in which these changes were
> introduced. Ripping them out to get the codebase back into a state from
> which we are comfortable moving forward is the only sane way of dealing
> with them.

Wait, what?  The kmod introduction was deliberate and solves a real
problem.  kmod itself was created _because_ of these issues that had
been seen and found.  It was written for the systemd/udev projects to
use, and had been worked on for a long time by a number of developers.
By removing it, you have now negated that solution and we are back to
the old problems we had before.  That doesn't seem very wise to me, does
it to you?

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/17/2012 11:35 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:25:11PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> On 11/17/2012 11:19 PM, Greg KH wrote:
>>> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:02:00PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>>>> On 11/17/2012 10:29 PM, Greg KH wrote:
>>>>> I see an "entertaining" fork of udev on github at the moment (-ng,
>>>>> really?  What happens when someone wants to fork that, -ng-ng?  Be a bit
>>>>> more original in your naming please, good thing I never trademarked
>>>>> "udev" all those years ago, maybe I still should...)
>>>>
>>>> That was a placeholder name. If you checked before you sent your email,
>>>> you would see that we had settled on eudev.
>>>
>>> The name change still doesn't make it any less "entertaining" :)
>>>
>>> What does the "e" stand for?
>>
>> That is a common question. Someone associated with Canonical suggested
>> that e stand for embedded. Others consider the "eu" prefix to be the
>> greek root for "true". Honestly, we don't care. It is just a name.
> 
> I wouldn't pick "embedded" as the embedded world is now using systemd as
> it meets their requirements much better than anything else :)

As far as I know, they are using busybox.

>>>>> But, along those lines, what is the goal of the fork?  What are you
>>>>> trying to attempt to do with a fork of udev that could not be
>>>>> accomplished by:
>>>>>   - getting patches approved upstream
>>>>> or:
>>>>>   - keeping a simple set of patches outside of the upstream tree and
>>>>>     applying them to each release
>>>>
>>>> The goal is to replace systemd as upstream for Gentoo Linux, its
>>>> derivatives and any distribution not related to RedHat.
>>>
>>> Wait, really?  You want to replace systemd?  Then why are you starting
>>> at udev and not systemd?
>>>
>>> What is wrong with systemd that it requires a fork?  All other distros
>>> seem to be participating in the development process of systemd quite
>>> well, what is keeping Gentoo developers from also doing the same?
>>>
>>> What are your goals, specifically, in detail.
>>
>> Is there any way that the answer to your inquiry would result in a
>> productive conversation where you would not attempt to dictate what we do?
> 
> I'm genuinely interested in your goals, in detail, otherwise I would
> not have asked about them.  Perhaps I am totally wrong and your fork
> makes sense, perhaps, to me, not.  But without knowing such goals,
> there's no way that anyone can get an idea about this.

I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the
waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you,
but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been
well defined. Some short term goals have been defined, but I imagine
that you are already familiar with them. I suggest asking again after
our first tag.

A consequence of being open source means that everyone can see what we
do, so people are able to send us their opinions on things that have not
been officially announced, much like this project.

>>>>> I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
>>>>> binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
>>>>> surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?  And is
>>>>> something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of a working
>>>>> udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes, it is a
>>>>> regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of more
>>>>> processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)
>>>>
>>>> See the following:
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/issues/3
>>>
>>> You moved from an explicit to an implicit dependency.  It's not
>>> inspiring any sense of confidence from me that there is an understanding
>>> of how things work here.
>>>
>>> Seriously, the codebase you are working with isn't that large, or
>>> complex, at all.  To go rip stuff out, only to want to add it back in
>>> later, wastes time, causes bugs, and goes against _any_ software
>>> methodology that I know of.
>>
>> I can say the same about the manner in which these changes were
>> introduced. Ripping them out to get the codebase back into a state from
>> which we are comfortable moving forward is the only sane way of dealing
>> with them.
> 
> Wait, what?  The kmod introduction was deliberate and solves a real
> problem.  kmod itself was created _because_ of these issues that had
> been seen and found.  It was written for the systemd/udev projects to
> use, and had been worked on for a long time by a number of developers.
> By removing it, you have now negated that solution and we are back to
> the old problems we had before.  That doesn't seem very wise to me, does
> it to you?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h

Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
is no need for this one.

With that said, Linux distributions are victims of people continually
trying to reinvent the wheel with no formal planning. At some point,
someone has to enforce a form of structure where further change occurs
in a well defined manner and change because we can is rejected as being
pointless. That is what we want and that is what we feel that our users
want.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

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On 17/11/2012 21:00, Richard Yao wrote:
> I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the
> waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you,
> but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been
> well defined. 

Can I step in and just as you to shut your mouth? It might not be the
most tactful way to say it, but the more you write, the more Gentoo as a
whole project is looking like a circus... the "AGILE" bullshit was
really the last straw for me trying to keep quiet...

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/18/2012 12:05 AM, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> On 17/11/2012 21:00, Richard Yao wrote:
>> I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the
>> waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you,
>> but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been
>> well defined. 
> 
> Can I step in and just as you to shut your mouth? It might not be the
> most tactful way to say it, but the more you write, the more Gentoo as a
> whole project is looking like a circus... the "AGILE" bullshit was
> really the last straw for me trying to keep quiet...
> 

I would appreciate it if people would avoid harassing others that decide
to develop things different than what they want to use. Read GLEP 0039:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0039.html

We do not need to justify the need for our project before it is
announced or even after it is announced. It is free to conflict with
RedHat's systemd project. If we find next year that we can reconcile
with Kay Sievers and Lennart Poettering, then we are free to do that.
These projects need not be long term commitments.

There is absolutely no reason for this harassment.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

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On 17/11/2012 21:13, Richard Yao wrote:
> I would appreciate it if people would avoid harassing others that decide
> to develop things different than what they want to use. Read GLEP 0039:

And I would appreciate if you'd avoid making us look like a bunch of
wannabes, by using buzzwords like "waterfall" and "agile" just because
you read about them in a book or something.

Really, I'm not caring a single bit about what you want to do with your
free time, and I'm not telling you to shut your project down (as I
can't). Heck I'm the cause of its existence I'm afraid.

But you've made Gentoo the laughing stock of the Linux world over the
past couple of days, and now you come up with this? Please get a clue,
please.

I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you're going quite a tad overboard,
and looks like your concept of development is "I'm not sure of what I'm
doing, but I'm doing it anyway".

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/18/2012 12:20 AM, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> But you've made Gentoo the laughing stock of the Linux world over the
> past couple of days, and now you come up with this? Please get a clue,
> please.

Arguably, the fact that others forced our hand before we were ready lead
to the widespread attention. With that said, responses to Gentoo have
always been mixed, but I have seen far more positive responses than
negative responses and I am quite happy with the result.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

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On 17/11/2012 21:26, Richard Yao wrote:
> Arguably, the fact that others forced our hand before we were ready lead
> to the widespread attention. With that said, responses to Gentoo have
> always been mixed, but I have seen far more positive responses than
> negative responses and I am quite happy with the result.

Then keep being happy for the result, but leave it to someone else to
speak. Because Robin is not making us looking like a bunch of idiots,
you are, with your replies.

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Joshua Kinard]

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On 11/18/2012 12:20 AM, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you're going quite a tad overboard,
> and looks like your concept of development is "I'm not sure of what I'm
> doing, but I'm doing it anyway".

It's human nature to wake up one day and exclaim, "I will develop X!", and
then go off and do so without any formal planning or even a rough idea of
how to start.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes, you
just roll dice.  That's what keeps life interesting.

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

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On 17/11/2012 21:52, Joshua Kinard wrote:
> It's human nature to wake up one day and exclaim, "I will develop X!", and
> then go off and do so without any formal planning or even a rough idea of
> how to start.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes, you
> just roll dice.  That's what keeps life interesting.

Agreed. Heck I've worked for how long on Gentoo/FreeBSD? And did I have
a plan for most of that? Not really.

But I didn't go around saying that I was "not following the waterfall"
or "developing AGILE". I was just doing shit that sounded cool and
looked nice. Did I expect much out of it? Not really.

At the end we did get something, in particular we got OpenRC out of it,
which has served us very well for quite a while, and we never planned
for it before that. But it was just luck, and I wouldn't brag about it.

That's why I'm not saying "please shut down the project", just "please
keep ryao away from the keyboard".

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Doug Goldstein]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Diego Elio Pettenò
<flameeyes@flameeyes.eu> wrote:
> On 17/11/2012 21:52, Joshua Kinard wrote:
>> It's human nature to wake up one day and exclaim, "I will develop X!", and
>> then go off and do so without any formal planning or even a rough idea of
>> how to start.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes, you
>> just roll dice.  That's what keeps life interesting.
>
> Agreed. Heck I've worked for how long on Gentoo/FreeBSD? And did I have
> a plan for most of that? Not really.
>
> But I didn't go around saying that I was "not following the waterfall"
> or "developing AGILE". I was just doing shit that sounded cool and
> looked nice. Did I expect much out of it? Not really.
>
> At the end we did get something, in particular we got OpenRC out of it,
> which has served us very well for quite a while, and we never planned
> for it before that. But it was just luck, and I wouldn't brag about it.

Diego I'm going to have to call you out here. You've so far in this
thread claimed you were the reason behind the "eudev" project and now
claim you're behind OpenRC. Sounds like bragging to me.

>
> That's why I'm not saying "please shut down the project", just "please
> keep ryao away from the keyboard".
>
> --
> Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
> flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/
>



-- 
Doug Goldstein

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

On 17/11/2012 23:05, Doug Goldstein wrote:
> Diego I'm going to have to call you out here. You've so far in this
> thread claimed you were the reason behind the "eudev" project and now
> claim you're behind OpenRC. Sounds like bragging to me.

Please don't put words in my mouth. I'm not behind any of the two and I
don't want to be. So let me qualify.

For "eudev" — I told ryao to "go and fork udev". This is not exactly the
effect I was aiming for, but okay, it's done, I should have spoken more
carefully (kinda like Robin said regarding the copyright earlier).

As for OpenRC — Roy's the guy who made it and there's no way I'm going
to take that from him. But it did come out of Gentoo/FreeBSD (which, by
the way, was not my brainchild, but ka0ttic's afaict ­— I just had more
time in my hands at that point that I made it viable), as it was
basically a rewrite of baselayout 2 to be independent of the Linux code.
Most people don't even know that, and I'm fine with that.

Sometimes you do shit because you feel like doing it, and sometimes it
brings you results, other times it brings you nothing... it's just shit
you're doing, which is fine but makes you neither bad nor good.

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:13:37AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> We do not need to justify the need for our project before it is
> announced or even after it is announced. It is free to conflict with
> RedHat's systemd project. If we find next year that we can reconcile
> with Kay Sievers and Lennart Poettering, then we are free to do that.
> These projects need not be long term commitments.

systemd is not a "Red Hat" project at all.  It just happens to have some
of the developers of it working for them.  If that is their job to
develop it or not, is unknown to all of us.

Also, in the beginning of systemd, a lot of the code, and research, was
done by someone working for a distro different than Red Hat.

systemd is a freedesktop.org project, that is all, please don't play
this as a distro-vs-distro issue, otherwise it will end up looking like
it is a "Gentoo vs. the world" thing, and I, as a long-term Gentoo
developer, do not want that at all.

So, I'll say this again, why is this project getting the copyright of
the Gentoo Foundation?  Is it an "official" project of Gentoo in some
manner?

And, to all of you who have emailed me privately saying they don't want
to talk about this on-list, that's what gentoo-core is for, I'd be glad
to take it there if you feel gentoo-dev is to "public" for stuff like
this.  Otherwise, this is opensource, we do development in the open, not
in private.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/18/2012 12:35 AM, Greg KH wrote:
> So, I'll say this again, why is this project getting the copyright of
> the Gentoo Foundation?  Is it an "official" project of Gentoo in some
> manner?

One developer who asked to join our project as we are in the process of
getting started thought he would be helpful by working on this. He is
behind the commit that you find to be objectionable and I am going to
let him fix it.

As for being an official project, we will make an official announcement
soon. Others wanted to have a repository that people could use on their
systems before we did an announcement to avoid a paper launch. I agreed
with their sentiments, which is why it is unannounced at this time.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:00:52AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> > I'm genuinely interested in your goals, in detail, otherwise I would
> > not have asked about them.  Perhaps I am totally wrong and your fork
> > makes sense, perhaps, to me, not.  But without knowing such goals,
> > there's no way that anyone can get an idea about this.
> 
> I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the
> waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you,
> but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been
> well defined. Some short term goals have been defined, but I imagine
> that you are already familiar with them. I suggest asking again after
> our first tag.

I'll ignore the fact that project goals have nothing to do with
waterfall or agile, and ask, what are your short-term goals?

Why is this an "official" Gentoo project without this being discussed in
an open manner?

> A consequence of being open source means that everyone can see what we
> do, so people are able to send us their opinions on things that have not
> been officially announced, much like this project.

Given that the Gentoo Foundation is claiming copyright on this project
now, not announcing it seems a bit rude to the rest of us who make up
this foundation, don't you think?

That's not very open :(

> >>>>> I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
> >>>>> binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
> >>>>> surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?  And is
> >>>>> something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of a working
> >>>>> udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes, it is a
> >>>>> regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of more
> >>>>> processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)
> >>>>
> >>>> See the following:
> >>>>
> >>>> https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/issues/3
> >>>
> >>> You moved from an explicit to an implicit dependency.  It's not
> >>> inspiring any sense of confidence from me that there is an understanding
> >>> of how things work here.
> >>>
> >>> Seriously, the codebase you are working with isn't that large, or
> >>> complex, at all.  To go rip stuff out, only to want to add it back in
> >>> later, wastes time, causes bugs, and goes against _any_ software
> >>> methodology that I know of.
> >>
> >> I can say the same about the manner in which these changes were
> >> introduced. Ripping them out to get the codebase back into a state from
> >> which we are comfortable moving forward is the only sane way of dealing
> >> with them.
> > 
> > Wait, what?  The kmod introduction was deliberate and solves a real
> > problem.  kmod itself was created _because_ of these issues that had
> > been seen and found.  It was written for the systemd/udev projects to
> > use, and had been worked on for a long time by a number of developers.
> > By removing it, you have now negated that solution and we are back to
> > the old problems we had before.  That doesn't seem very wise to me, does
> > it to you?
> > 
> > thanks,
> > 
> > greg k-h
> 
> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
> dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
> can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
> is no need for this one.

You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all, right?

> With that said, Linux distributions are victims of people continually
> trying to reinvent the wheel with no formal planning.

Huh?  Really?  It's as if you think we all are just throwing stuff
against the wall and seeing what sticks?  We aren't responding to real
users, customers, research, history, and competitors?  Your dismissal of
the people who create the system you are using seems pretty bold.

> At some point, someone has to enforce a form of structure where
> further change occurs in a well defined manner and change because we
> can is rejected as being pointless. That is what we want and that is
> what we feel that our users want.

Ok, what is that structure you are wishing were present?  What problems
do you have with systemd on a technical level that are not being
addressed?  What technical problems with udev do you have that caused
this to be forked?  What problems are you wishing to solve, and what
goals do you have by doing all of this?

Have you studied the problem area for booting, process monitoring,
system isolation, device creation and notification, persistant naming,
multiple users with multiple displays, and the like, and found that
Linux is lacking in this area?  If so, I would love to learn more, as I
want Linux, and Gentoo, to succeed.  Without knowing the problems you
are having, there's no way anyone will ever change.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/18/2012 12:19 AM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:00:52AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>>> I'm genuinely interested in your goals, in detail, otherwise I would
>>> not have asked about them.  Perhaps I am totally wrong and your fork
>>> makes sense, perhaps, to me, not.  But without knowing such goals,
>>> there's no way that anyone can get an idea about this.
>>
>> I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the
>> waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you,
>> but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been
>> well defined. Some short term goals have been defined, but I imagine
>> that you are already familiar with them. I suggest asking again after
>> our first tag.
> 
> I'll ignore the fact that project goals have nothing to do with
> waterfall or agile, and ask, what are your short-term goals?
> 
> Why is this an "official" Gentoo project without this being discussed in
> an open manner?

We are in the process of getting started. If you read my original email,
you would know that the announcement was supposed to occur relatively
soon. The reason I sent it was because the Gentoo Council meeting
required something be sent sooner than we were ready.

>> A consequence of being open source means that everyone can see what we
>> do, so people are able to send us their opinions on things that have not
>> been officially announced, much like this project.
> 
> Given that the Gentoo Foundation is claiming copyright on this project
> now, not announcing it seems a bit rude to the rest of us who make up
> this foundation, don't you think?
> 
> That's not very open :(

Actually, that is one developer who asked if he could join the project
and thought that he was being helpful. I insisted that those changes go
into a branch because I felt that they could cause problems.

>>>>>>> I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
>>>>>>> binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
>>>>>>> surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?  And is
>>>>>>> something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of a working
>>>>>>> udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes, it is a
>>>>>>> regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of more
>>>>>>> processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> See the following:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/issues/3
>>>>>
>>>>> You moved from an explicit to an implicit dependency.  It's not
>>>>> inspiring any sense of confidence from me that there is an understanding
>>>>> of how things work here.
>>>>>
>>>>> Seriously, the codebase you are working with isn't that large, or
>>>>> complex, at all.  To go rip stuff out, only to want to add it back in
>>>>> later, wastes time, causes bugs, and goes against _any_ software
>>>>> methodology that I know of.
>>>>
>>>> I can say the same about the manner in which these changes were
>>>> introduced. Ripping them out to get the codebase back into a state from
>>>> which we are comfortable moving forward is the only sane way of dealing
>>>> with them.
>>>
>>> Wait, what?  The kmod introduction was deliberate and solves a real
>>> problem.  kmod itself was created _because_ of these issues that had
>>> been seen and found.  It was written for the systemd/udev projects to
>>> use, and had been worked on for a long time by a number of developers.
>>> By removing it, you have now negated that solution and we are back to
>>> the old problems we had before.  That doesn't seem very wise to me, does
>>> it to you?
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>>
>>> greg k-h
>>
>> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
>> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
>> dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
>> can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
>> is no need for this one.
> 
> You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all, right?

kmod does not exist on my system and eudev builds without a problem. I
am thinking of writing my own busybox-style code to handle module
loading in the builtin when the configure script is told not to build
with kmod. Does this not avoid the dependency?

>> With that said, Linux distributions are victims of people continually
>> trying to reinvent the wheel with no formal planning.
> 
> Huh?  Really?  It's as if you think we all are just throwing stuff
> against the wall and seeing what sticks?  We aren't responding to real
> users, customers, research, history, and competitors?  Your dismissal of
> the people who create the system you are using seems pretty bold.

The result of what the existing people have been doing has been the
equivalent of throwing stuff against the wall for many of us. We have
decided to try doing things ourselves to see if we can do better. We
think we can.

>> At some point, someone has to enforce a form of structure where
>> further change occurs in a well defined manner and change because we
>> can is rejected as being pointless. That is what we want and that is
>> what we feel that our users want.
> 
> Ok, what is that structure you are wishing were present?  What problems
> do you have with systemd on a technical level that are not being
> addressed?  What technical problems with udev do you have that caused
> this to be forked?  What problems are you wishing to solve, and what
> goals do you have by doing all of this?
> 
> Have you studied the problem area for booting, process monitoring,
> system isolation, device creation and notification, persistant naming,
> multiple users with multiple displays, and the like, and found that
> Linux is lacking in this area?  If so, I would love to learn more, as I
> want Linux, and Gentoo, to succeed.  Without knowing the problems you
> are having, there's no way anyone will ever change.

We already have OpenRC, which has been found to work well on both Gentoo
Linux and Gentoo FreeBSD. The integration of udev into systemd has
caused problems for existing OpenRC systems with people being told that
it is okay to break configurations that users had been told to use over
well over a decade. Many of us consider that to be unacceptable.

Anyway, results are what are important. If you are interested in what we
are doing, then I suggest coming back in a month to see what we have
produced.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:35:22AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 11/18/2012 12:19 AM, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:00:52AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> >>> I'm genuinely interested in your goals, in detail, otherwise I would
> >>> not have asked about them.  Perhaps I am totally wrong and your fork
> >>> makes sense, perhaps, to me, not.  But without knowing such goals,
> >>> there's no way that anyone can get an idea about this.
> >>
> >> I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the
> >> waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you,
> >> but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been
> >> well defined. Some short term goals have been defined, but I imagine
> >> that you are already familiar with them. I suggest asking again after
> >> our first tag.
> > 
> > I'll ignore the fact that project goals have nothing to do with
> > waterfall or agile, and ask, what are your short-term goals?
> > 
> > Why is this an "official" Gentoo project without this being discussed in
> > an open manner?
> 
> We are in the process of getting started. If you read my original email,
> you would know that the announcement was supposed to occur relatively
> soon. The reason I sent it was because the Gentoo Council meeting
> required something be sent sooner than we were ready.

The "announce later, act first" seems like a new move for the Gentoo
Council to be taking.  Is this really an official act that the council
is approving?

Why wait to announce a project that is being hosted on a Gentoo account,
with Gentoo Foundation copyrights on them?  I don't understand the
delay.

> >>> Wait, what?  The kmod introduction was deliberate and solves a real
> >>> problem.  kmod itself was created _because_ of these issues that had
> >>> been seen and found.  It was written for the systemd/udev projects to
> >>> use, and had been worked on for a long time by a number of developers.
> >>> By removing it, you have now negated that solution and we are back to
> >>> the old problems we had before.  That doesn't seem very wise to me, does
> >>> it to you?
> >>>
> >>> thanks,
> >>>
> >>> greg k-h
> >>
> >> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
> >> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
> >> dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
> >> can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
> >> is no need for this one.
> > 
> > You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all, right?
> 
> kmod does not exist on my system and eudev builds without a problem.

Are you using busybox to load your kernel modules?  Are you saying that
this is something that will be required here?

Or is this change because you want to use busybox to load your modules?
If so, why not just use mdev instead of udev at all?  That's what mdev
was created for, busybox-like systems that don't want the "heavy" udev
on them.

> I am thinking of writing my own busybox-style code to handle module
> loading in the builtin when the configure script is told not to build
> with kmod. Does this not avoid the dependency?

So we will now have 3 different Linux kernel loaders floating around?
What's wrong with using kmod in the first place?  What does it do that
is so wrong?

And again, back to my original point above, you have reintroduced the
problem that kmod solved.  How is that good?

> >> With that said, Linux distributions are victims of people continually
> >> trying to reinvent the wheel with no formal planning.
> > 
> > Huh?  Really?  It's as if you think we all are just throwing stuff
> > against the wall and seeing what sticks?  We aren't responding to real
> > users, customers, research, history, and competitors?  Your dismissal of
> > the people who create the system you are using seems pretty bold.
> 
> The result of what the existing people have been doing has been the
> equivalent of throwing stuff against the wall for many of us.

Really?  What, specifically, is wrong with the existing systemd solution
that you have a problem with?  Specifics please, otherwise they can't be
fixed.

> We have decided to try doing things ourselves to see if we can do
> better. We think we can.

That's wonderful, seriously.  But why is this suddenly an official
Gentoo project?  When did that happen, and why?  Why not just do a
"normal" project and if it matures and is good enough, then add it to
the distro like all other packages are added.

My main point here is the fact that this is now being seen as an act by
Gentoo, the distro / foundation.  And that happened in private, without
any anouncement.  Which is not good on many levels.

> > Have you studied the problem area for booting, process monitoring,
> > system isolation, device creation and notification, persistant naming,
> > multiple users with multiple displays, and the like, and found that
> > Linux is lacking in this area?  If so, I would love to learn more, as I
> > want Linux, and Gentoo, to succeed.  Without knowing the problems you
> > are having, there's no way anyone will ever change.
> 
> We already have OpenRC, which has been found to work well on both Gentoo
> Linux and Gentoo FreeBSD. The integration of udev into systemd has
> caused problems for existing OpenRC systems with people being told that
> it is okay to break configurations that users had been told to use over
> well over a decade. Many of us consider that to be unacceptable.

Part of the goal of systemd is to unify all Linux distros startup logic,
and configuration logic, to make things unified to help a whole lot of
things happen better and faster in the end.  It is a move to save
effort, and, is succeeding quite well.  If Gentoo does not wish to
participate in this effort, then those of us who are participating in
it, and are Gentoo developers, should be told this so that we can decide
what we wish to do.

OpenRC is great, and has worked well for 10+ years.  But seriously, it
is creaky in places, and doesn't do much at all compared to what systemd
offers.  If Gentoo wants to ignore systemd, it does so at its own peril.

Oh, and systemd has nothing to do with the /usr issue, don't ever get
that confused.  A separate /usr broke a long time ago, systemd just now
shows you how broken your system really was, and you didn't notice it :)

> Anyway, results are what are important. If you are interested in what we
> are doing, then I suggest coming back in a month to see what we have
> produced.

Why a month?  Where did that deadline come from?

And again, the main question that has never been answered yet, "What are
you trying to do here?"

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Doug Goldstein]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:49 AM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:35:22AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> On 11/18/2012 12:19 AM, Greg KH wrote:
>> > On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:00:52AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> >>> I'm genuinely interested in your goals, in detail, otherwise I would
>> >>> not have asked about them.  Perhaps I am totally wrong and your fork
>> >>> makes sense, perhaps, to me, not.  But without knowing such goals,
>> >>> there's no way that anyone can get an idea about this.
>> >>
>> >> I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the
>> >> waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you,
>> >> but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been
>> >> well defined. Some short term goals have been defined, but I imagine
>> >> that you are already familiar with them. I suggest asking again after
>> >> our first tag.
>> >
>> > I'll ignore the fact that project goals have nothing to do with
>> > waterfall or agile, and ask, what are your short-term goals?
>> >
>> > Why is this an "official" Gentoo project without this being discussed in
>> > an open manner?
>>
>> We are in the process of getting started. If you read my original email,
>> you would know that the announcement was supposed to occur relatively
>> soon. The reason I sent it was because the Gentoo Council meeting
>> required something be sent sooner than we were ready.
>
> The "announce later, act first" seems like a new move for the Gentoo
> Council to be taking.  Is this really an official act that the council
> is approving?
>
> Why wait to announce a project that is being hosted on a Gentoo account,
> with Gentoo Foundation copyrights on them?  I don't understand the
> delay.
>
>> >>> Wait, what?  The kmod introduction was deliberate and solves a real
>> >>> problem.  kmod itself was created _because_ of these issues that had
>> >>> been seen and found.  It was written for the systemd/udev projects to
>> >>> use, and had been worked on for a long time by a number of developers.
>> >>> By removing it, you have now negated that solution and we are back to
>> >>> the old problems we had before.  That doesn't seem very wise to me, does
>> >>> it to you?
>> >>>
>> >>> thanks,
>> >>>
>> >>> greg k-h
>> >>
>> >> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
>> >> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
>> >> dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
>> >> can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
>> >> is no need for this one.
>> >
>> > You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all, right?
>>
>> kmod does not exist on my system and eudev builds without a problem.
>
> Are you using busybox to load your kernel modules?  Are you saying that
> this is something that will be required here?
>
> Or is this change because you want to use busybox to load your modules?
> If so, why not just use mdev instead of udev at all?  That's what mdev
> was created for, busybox-like systems that don't want the "heavy" udev
> on them.
>
>> I am thinking of writing my own busybox-style code to handle module
>> loading in the builtin when the configure script is told not to build
>> with kmod. Does this not avoid the dependency?
>
> So we will now have 3 different Linux kernel loaders floating around?
> What's wrong with using kmod in the first place?  What does it do that
> is so wrong?
>
> And again, back to my original point above, you have reintroduced the
> problem that kmod solved.  How is that good?
>
>> >> With that said, Linux distributions are victims of people continually
>> >> trying to reinvent the wheel with no formal planning.
>> >
>> > Huh?  Really?  It's as if you think we all are just throwing stuff
>> > against the wall and seeing what sticks?  We aren't responding to real
>> > users, customers, research, history, and competitors?  Your dismissal of
>> > the people who create the system you are using seems pretty bold.
>>
>> The result of what the existing people have been doing has been the
>> equivalent of throwing stuff against the wall for many of us.
>
> Really?  What, specifically, is wrong with the existing systemd solution
> that you have a problem with?  Specifics please, otherwise they can't be
> fixed.
>
>> We have decided to try doing things ourselves to see if we can do
>> better. We think we can.
>
> That's wonderful, seriously.  But why is this suddenly an official
> Gentoo project?  When did that happen, and why?  Why not just do a
> "normal" project and if it matures and is good enough, then add it to
> the distro like all other packages are added.
>
> My main point here is the fact that this is now being seen as an act by
> Gentoo, the distro / foundation.  And that happened in private, without
> any anouncement.  Which is not good on many levels.
>
>> > Have you studied the problem area for booting, process monitoring,
>> > system isolation, device creation and notification, persistant naming,
>> > multiple users with multiple displays, and the like, and found that
>> > Linux is lacking in this area?  If so, I would love to learn more, as I
>> > want Linux, and Gentoo, to succeed.  Without knowing the problems you
>> > are having, there's no way anyone will ever change.
>>
>> We already have OpenRC, which has been found to work well on both Gentoo
>> Linux and Gentoo FreeBSD. The integration of udev into systemd has
>> caused problems for existing OpenRC systems with people being told that
>> it is okay to break configurations that users had been told to use over
>> well over a decade. Many of us consider that to be unacceptable.
>
> Part of the goal of systemd is to unify all Linux distros startup logic,
> and configuration logic, to make things unified to help a whole lot of
> things happen better and faster in the end.  It is a move to save
> effort, and, is succeeding quite well.  If Gentoo does not wish to
> participate in this effort, then those of us who are participating in
> it, and are Gentoo developers, should be told this so that we can decide
> what we wish to do.
>
> OpenRC is great, and has worked well for 10+ years.  But seriously, it
> is creaky in places, and doesn't do much at all compared to what systemd
> offers.  If Gentoo wants to ignore systemd, it does so at its own peril.
>
> Oh, and systemd has nothing to do with the /usr issue, don't ever get
> that confused.  A separate /usr broke a long time ago, systemd just now
> shows you how broken your system really was, and you didn't notice it :)
>
>> Anyway, results are what are important. If you are interested in what we
>> are doing, then I suggest coming back in a month to see what we have
>> produced.
>
> Why a month?  Where did that deadline come from?
>
> And again, the main question that has never been answered yet, "What are
> you trying to do here?"
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
>

Greg,

While I agree you have some valid points here, I do think you're being
a bit discouraging towards this. Honestly if they want to go off and
work on this project because it gets them excited about open source
then that's a good thing and they should be allowed to do that (the
whole Gentoo Foundation thing and copyright business aside) as a stand
alone project. What stake do you have in this to really hurl a bunch
of questions at them about their problems with existing solutions and
goals? I'd honestly just drop it and let them do what developers are
suppose to do and produce some code. Maybe the project goes no where,
maybe it comes up with some interesting ideas that can be merged in
with other projects, or maybe it becomes something that stands on its
own.

My feeling is if people want to code, let them code. Let them do what
they want to do and enjoy themselves, even if you think their idea
sucks.

-- 
Doug Goldstein

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Alec Warner]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:35:22AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> On 11/18/2012 12:19 AM, Greg KH wrote:
>> > On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:00:52AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> >>> I'm genuinely interested in your goals, in detail, otherwise I would
>> >>> not have asked about them.  Perhaps I am totally wrong and your fork
>> >>> makes sense, perhaps, to me, not.  But without knowing such goals,
>> >>> there's no way that anyone can get an idea about this.
>> >>
>> >> I am afraid that I have to disappoint you. If we were using the
>> >> waterfall model, I could outline some very nice long term goals for you,
>> >> but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not been
>> >> well defined. Some short term goals have been defined, but I imagine
>> >> that you are already familiar with them. I suggest asking again after
>> >> our first tag.
>> >
>> > I'll ignore the fact that project goals have nothing to do with
>> > waterfall or agile, and ask, what are your short-term goals?
>> >
>> > Why is this an "official" Gentoo project without this being discussed in
>> > an open manner?
>>
>> We are in the process of getting started. If you read my original email,
>> you would know that the announcement was supposed to occur relatively
>> soon. The reason I sent it was because the Gentoo Council meeting
>> required something be sent sooner than we were ready.
>
> The "announce later, act first" seems like a new move for the Gentoo
> Council to be taking.  Is this really an official act that the council
> is approving?
>
> Why wait to announce a project that is being hosted on a Gentoo account,
> with Gentoo Foundation copyrights on them?  I don't understand the
> delay.
>
>> >>> Wait, what?  The kmod introduction was deliberate and solves a real
>> >>> problem.  kmod itself was created _because_ of these issues that had
>> >>> been seen and found.  It was written for the systemd/udev projects to
>> >>> use, and had been worked on for a long time by a number of developers.
>> >>> By removing it, you have now negated that solution and we are back to
>> >>> the old problems we had before.  That doesn't seem very wise to me, does
>> >>> it to you?
>> >>>
>> >>> thanks,
>> >>>
>> >>> greg k-h
>> >>
>> >> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
>> >> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
>> >> dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
>> >> can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
>> >> is no need for this one.
>> >
>> > You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all, right?
>>
>> kmod does not exist on my system and eudev builds without a problem.
>
> Are you using busybox to load your kernel modules?  Are you saying that
> this is something that will be required here?
>
> Or is this change because you want to use busybox to load your modules?
> If so, why not just use mdev instead of udev at all?  That's what mdev
> was created for, busybox-like systems that don't want the "heavy" udev
> on them.
>
>> I am thinking of writing my own busybox-style code to handle module
>> loading in the builtin when the configure script is told not to build
>> with kmod. Does this not avoid the dependency?
>
> So we will now have 3 different Linux kernel loaders floating around?
> What's wrong with using kmod in the first place?  What does it do that
> is so wrong?
>
> And again, back to my original point above, you have reintroduced the
> problem that kmod solved.  How is that good?
>
>> >> With that said, Linux distributions are victims of people continually
>> >> trying to reinvent the wheel with no formal planning.
>> >
>> > Huh?  Really?  It's as if you think we all are just throwing stuff
>> > against the wall and seeing what sticks?  We aren't responding to real
>> > users, customers, research, history, and competitors?  Your dismissal of
>> > the people who create the system you are using seems pretty bold.
>>
>> The result of what the existing people have been doing has been the
>> equivalent of throwing stuff against the wall for many of us.
>
> Really?  What, specifically, is wrong with the existing systemd solution
> that you have a problem with?  Specifics please, otherwise they can't be
> fixed.
>

So I'm pretty sure the concerns were laid out in other threads.

1) systemd-udev will require systemd. Stated by the systemd
maintainers themselves as a thing they want to do in the future. Some
users don't want to use systemd. We could go into detail as to why;
but I think that is not as important as one may think. The point is
that the desire is there, and thusly there are users who want to make
other systems (namely openrc) work.

People like openrc. My VMs for instance, boot reasonably quickly.
Booting 5 seconds faster may be super duper, but not at the cost of an
existing reliable solution.

>> We have decided to try doing things ourselves to see if we can do
>> better. We think we can.
>
> That's wonderful, seriously.  But why is this suddenly an official
> Gentoo project?  When did that happen, and why?  Why not just do a
> "normal" project and if it matures and is good enough, then add it to
> the distro like all other packages are added.
>
> My main point here is the fact that this is now being seen as an act by
> Gentoo, the distro / foundation.  And that happened in private, without
> any anouncement.  Which is not good on many levels.

I'm unsure on what grounds you disapprove. People start (and abandon)
projects often in Gentoo. Suddenly you dislike one such project and
object to this practice? Certainly if we had to get some sort of
Foundation consensus (for anything) nothing would happen. We can't
even get more than 40% of foundation members to vote.

>
>> > Have you studied the problem area for booting, process monitoring,
>> > system isolation, device creation and notification, persistant naming,
>> > multiple users with multiple displays, and the like, and found that
>> > Linux is lacking in this area?  If so, I would love to learn more, as I
>> > want Linux, and Gentoo, to succeed.  Without knowing the problems you
>> > are having, there's no way anyone will ever change.
>>
>> We already have OpenRC, which has been found to work well on both Gentoo
>> Linux and Gentoo FreeBSD. The integration of udev into systemd has
>> caused problems for existing OpenRC systems with people being told that
>> it is okay to break configurations that users had been told to use over
>> well over a decade. Many of us consider that to be unacceptable.
>
> Part of the goal of systemd is to unify all Linux distros startup logic,
> and configuration logic, to make things unified to help a whole lot of
> things happen better and faster in the end.  It is a move to save
> effort, and, is succeeding quite well.  If Gentoo does not wish to
> participate in this effort, then those of us who are participating in
> it, and are Gentoo developers, should be told this so that we can decide
> what we wish to do.

You presume Gentoo acts as a whole. This is almost never true. Just
because we host the project, and gentoo staffs the project, or even
that the copyright is on the project, doesn't mean 'we reached a
consensus and decided systemd sucks.' Certainly the existing sytemd
maintainer in Gentoo doesn't think so. However a number of folks *do*
think so, and are willing to put effort into it. I'm unsure why we
should prevent them from doing so.

For the guy who earlier claimed that forking was great and encouraged
it; I am confused as to why it is suddenly discouraged now.

>
> OpenRC is great, and has worked well for 10+ years.  But seriously, it
> is creaky in places, and doesn't do much at all compared to what systemd
> offers.  If Gentoo wants to ignore systemd, it does so at its own peril.
>
> Oh, and systemd has nothing to do with the /usr issue, don't ever get
> that confused.  A separate /usr broke a long time ago, systemd just now
> shows you how broken your system really was, and you didn't notice it :)

I agree I think folks think they can solve this with udev. I think
even the early patches to try to 'fix' it are going to teach them that
it is perhaps harder than they know. Perhaps they are merely
inexperienced, and they will learn from the effort.

>
>> Anyway, results are what are important. If you are interested in what we
>> are doing, then I suggest coming back in a month to see what we have
>> produced.
>
> Why a month?  Where did that deadline come from?
>
> And again, the main question that has never been answered yet, "What are
> you trying to do here?"
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
>

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:02:19PM -0800, Alec Warner wrote:
> 1) systemd-udev will require systemd. Stated by the systemd
> maintainers themselves as a thing they want to do in the future. Some
> users don't want to use systemd. We could go into detail as to why;
> but I think that is not as important as one may think. The point is
> that the desire is there, and thusly there are users who want to make
> other systems (namely openrc) work.
> 
> People like openrc. My VMs for instance, boot reasonably quickly.
> Booting 5 seconds faster may be super duper, but not at the cost of an
> existing reliable solution.

So is this the goal?  Great, someone say that then, that's all I'm
asking for here.

> > That's wonderful, seriously.  But why is this suddenly an official
> > Gentoo project?  When did that happen, and why?  Why not just do a
> > "normal" project and if it matures and is good enough, then add it to
> > the distro like all other packages are added.
> >
> > My main point here is the fact that this is now being seen as an act by
> > Gentoo, the distro / foundation.  And that happened in private, without
> > any anouncement.  Which is not good on many levels.
> 
> I'm unsure on what grounds you disapprove. People start (and abandon)
> projects often in Gentoo. Suddenly you dislike one such project and
> object to this practice? Certainly if we had to get some sort of
> Foundation consensus (for anything) nothing would happen. We can't
> even get more than 40% of foundation members to vote.

I object if this is seen as a "Gentoo blessed" fork of a community
project that is worked on by all other major Linux distros.  That is the
type of decision that can be made by the Gentoo Council, which is fine,
but it sure would be nice if it were publicly stated, instead of having
to see it on the Gentoo github site instead.

And if that is the decision of the council, I would expect the ability
to have some type of discussion about it, wouldn't you?

Also, the whole issue with the copyrights is very serious, for the
reasons I've stated before.  Don't mess with copyrights, developers, and
companies, take them very serious, as they are the basis for our
licenses.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Kacper Kowalik]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3118 bytes --]

On 18.11.2012 08:57, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:02:19PM -0800, Alec Warner wrote:
>> 1) systemd-udev will require systemd. Stated by the systemd
>> maintainers themselves as a thing they want to do in the future. Some
>> users don't want to use systemd. We could go into detail as to why;
>> but I think that is not as important as one may think. The point is
>> that the desire is there, and thusly there are users who want to make
>> other systems (namely openrc) work.
>>
>> People like openrc. My VMs for instance, boot reasonably quickly.
>> Booting 5 seconds faster may be super duper, but not at the cost of an
>> existing reliable solution.
> 
> So is this the goal?  Great, someone say that then, that's all I'm
> asking for here.
> 
>>> That's wonderful, seriously.  But why is this suddenly an official
>>> Gentoo project?  When did that happen, and why?  Why not just do a
>>> "normal" project and if it matures and is good enough, then add it to
>>> the distro like all other packages are added.
>>>
>>> My main point here is the fact that this is now being seen as an act by
>>> Gentoo, the distro / foundation.  And that happened in private, without
>>> any anouncement.  Which is not good on many levels.
>>
>> I'm unsure on what grounds you disapprove. People start (and abandon)
>> projects often in Gentoo. Suddenly you dislike one such project and
>> object to this practice? Certainly if we had to get some sort of
>> Foundation consensus (for anything) nothing would happen. We can't
>> even get more than 40% of foundation members to vote.
> 
> I object if this is seen as a "Gentoo blessed" fork of a community
> project that is worked on by all other major Linux distros.  That is the
> type of decision that can be made by the Gentoo Council, which is fine,
> but it sure would be nice if it were publicly stated, instead of having
> to see it on the Gentoo github site instead.

Hi,
I've seen this argument being repeated all over this thread and I'd like
to clarify: http://github.com/gentoo (nor it's bitbucket.org
counterpart) was never meant to host "Gentoo blessed" forks/projects and
it *doesn't*.
Sole purpose of it, was to encourage more contribution from users using
web goodies like "click a button to fork", since most of the people are
very comfortable with github's workflow. We (gentoo-science team) have
seen significant increase of interest since we've started using github.
Cheers,
Kacper

P.s. Just to emphasise it even more: There's a pornview fork there too.
I don't recall Gentoo Council acknowledging it as default imageviewer.
We should definitely put it into agenda. </reductio ad absurdum>

> And if that is the decision of the council, I would expect the ability
> to have some type of discussion about it, wouldn't you?
> 
> Also, the whole issue with the copyrights is very serious, for the
> reasons I've stated before.  Don't mess with copyrights, developers, and
> companies, take them very serious, as they are the basis for our
> licenses.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h
> 




[-- Attachment #2: OpenPGP digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 900 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rafael Goncalves Martins]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Kacper Kowalik <xarthisius@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 18.11.2012 08:57, Greg KH wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:02:19PM -0800, Alec Warner wrote:
>>> 1) systemd-udev will require systemd. Stated by the systemd
>>> maintainers themselves as a thing they want to do in the future. Some
>>> users don't want to use systemd. We could go into detail as to why;
>>> but I think that is not as important as one may think. The point is
>>> that the desire is there, and thusly there are users who want to make
>>> other systems (namely openrc) work.
>>>
>>> People like openrc. My VMs for instance, boot reasonably quickly.
>>> Booting 5 seconds faster may be super duper, but not at the cost of an
>>> existing reliable solution.
>>
>> So is this the goal?  Great, someone say that then, that's all I'm
>> asking for here.
>>
>>>> That's wonderful, seriously.  But why is this suddenly an official
>>>> Gentoo project?  When did that happen, and why?  Why not just do a
>>>> "normal" project and if it matures and is good enough, then add it to
>>>> the distro like all other packages are added.
>>>>
>>>> My main point here is the fact that this is now being seen as an act by
>>>> Gentoo, the distro / foundation.  And that happened in private, without
>>>> any anouncement.  Which is not good on many levels.
>>>
>>> I'm unsure on what grounds you disapprove. People start (and abandon)
>>> projects often in Gentoo. Suddenly you dislike one such project and
>>> object to this practice? Certainly if we had to get some sort of
>>> Foundation consensus (for anything) nothing would happen. We can't
>>> even get more than 40% of foundation members to vote.
>>
>> I object if this is seen as a "Gentoo blessed" fork of a community
>> project that is worked on by all other major Linux distros.  That is the
>> type of decision that can be made by the Gentoo Council, which is fine,
>> but it sure would be nice if it were publicly stated, instead of having
>> to see it on the Gentoo github site instead.
>
> Hi,
> I've seen this argument being repeated all over this thread and I'd like
> to clarify: http://github.com/gentoo (nor it's bitbucket.org
> counterpart) was never meant to host "Gentoo blessed" forks/projects and
> it *doesn't*.
> Sole purpose of it, was to encourage more contribution from users using
> web goodies like "click a button to fork", since most of the people are
> very comfortable with github's workflow. We (gentoo-science team) have
> seen significant increase of interest since we've started using github.
> Cheers,
> Kacper

Hi,

Well, if yoiu fork a big community project, like udev, in a github
account called gentoo, people *will* think it is a Gentoo project.

If these organizations aren't governed by Gentoo they should have some
disclaimers, saying that the projects hosted there aren't sponsored by
Gentoo, but this udev-ng/eudev/whatever thing does the opposite and
actually advertise the Gentoo sponsorship with the sentence "This is a
Gentoo sponsored project and testing is currently being done with
openrc." in their README

I don't think that someone can claim this sponsorship without a council vote.

I disagree with this fork, and tend to agree with what Greg and Diego
said before in this thread.

BR,

Rafael

> P.s. Just to emphasise it even more: There's a pornview fork there too.
> I don't recall Gentoo Council acknowledging it as default imageviewer.
> We should definitely put it into agenda. </reductio ad absurdum>

You really want to compare pornview, that was dead and someone kindly
resurrected, with udev, that is actively maintained and the quality of
the fork is questionable? :(

>> And if that is the decision of the council, I would expect the ability
>> to have some type of discussion about it, wouldn't you?
>>
>> Also, the whole issue with the copyrights is very serious, for the
>> reasons I've stated before.  Don't mess with copyrights, developers, and
>> companies, take them very serious, as they are the basis for our
>> licenses.
>>
>> thanks,
>>
>> greg k-h
>>
>
>
>



-- 
Rafael Goncalves Martins
Gentoo Linux developer
http://rafaelmartins.eng.br/

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Rafael Goncalves Martins
<rafaelmartins@gentoo.org> wrote:
> If these organizations aren't governed by Gentoo they should have some
> disclaimers, saying that the projects hosted there aren't sponsored by
> Gentoo, but this udev-ng/eudev/whatever thing does the opposite and
> actually advertise the Gentoo sponsorship with the sentence "This is a
> Gentoo sponsored project and testing is currently being done with
> openrc." in their README
>
> I don't think that someone can claim this sponsorship without a council vote.
>

Read GLEP 39.  Any dev can create a project.  Granted, most Gentoo
projects don't follow the GLEP to the letter, and as long as nothing
goes wrong it isn't a big problem. The council can step in if
necessary, but having some source out on github won't kill anybody.

Keep in mind though that using github exclusively isn't exactly
aligned with the social contract - I would encourage having the
sources on Gentoo servers.  That said, I don't think it matters where
people do the work vs what is the mirror - just nobody should be
forced to use github (proprietary) to contribute.

As long as everybody behaves Gentoo devs can work on whatever they
want to.  None of us are paid to do this.

If a bunch of strangers made the same claim I'd be more concerned.

If anybody feels a Gentoo project is out of line feel free to submit a
bug to the Council or Trustees as appropriate.  However, please save
that for things like "they're breaking the law" or "they refuse to
have elections for a lead" or whatever, and not "I don't like what
they're working on."  The recourse for the latter is to adjust your
profile/USE-flags/killfile as appropriate.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rafael Goncalves Martins]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 2:36 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Rafael Goncalves Martins
> <rafaelmartins@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> If these organizations aren't governed by Gentoo they should have some
>> disclaimers, saying that the projects hosted there aren't sponsored by
>> Gentoo, but this udev-ng/eudev/whatever thing does the opposite and
>> actually advertise the Gentoo sponsorship with the sentence "This is a
>> Gentoo sponsored project and testing is currently being done with
>> openrc." in their README
>>
>> I don't think that someone can claim this sponsorship without a council vote.
>>
>
> Read GLEP 39.  Any dev can create a project.  Granted, most Gentoo
> projects don't follow the GLEP to the letter, and as long as nothing
> goes wrong it isn't a big problem. The council can step in if
> necessary, but having some source out on github won't kill anybody.

Yeah, but I think that there's a big difference about any developer
being allowed to create a project under the gentoo umbrella and create
a project and claim it as Gentoo sponsored without any review of the
council. I agree that it can exists in the Github account, or even in
our own infrastructure, but say that Gentoo supports it without a
previous analysis of the council is wrong IMHO.

> Keep in mind though that using github exclusively isn't exactly
> aligned with the social contract - I would encourage having the
> sources on Gentoo servers.  That said, I don't think it matters where
> people do the work vs what is the mirror - just nobody should be
> forced to use github (proprietary) to contribute.
>
> As long as everybody behaves Gentoo devs can work on whatever they
> want to.  None of us are paid to do this.
>
> If a bunch of strangers made the same claim I'd be more concerned.
>
> If anybody feels a Gentoo project is out of line feel free to submit a
> bug to the Council or Trustees as appropriate.  However, please save
> that for things like "they're breaking the law" or "they refuse to
> have elections for a lead" or whatever, and not "I don't like what
> they're working on."  The recourse for the latter is to adjust your
> profile/USE-flags/killfile as appropriate.
>
> Rich
>

-- 
Rafael Goncalves Martins
Gentoo Linux developer
http://rafaelmartins.eng.br/

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Rafael Goncalves Martins
<rafaelmartins@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Yeah, but I think that there's a big difference about any developer
> being allowed to create a project under the gentoo umbrella and create
> a project and claim it as Gentoo sponsored without any review of the
> council. I agree that it can exists in the Github account, or even in
> our own infrastructure, but say that Gentoo supports it without a
> previous analysis of the council is wrong IMHO.

In practice there is no difference.  About the only "sponsorship"
Gentoo projects get most of the time is hosting, and considering that
they stuck this one on Github they're not really even getting that.

That said, I see no reason why this project would be any less eligible
for other forms of sponsorship than other projects are, assuming that
somebody can make a compelling pitch for the Trustees.  The Foundation
is aimed to further Gentoo in particular in FOSS in general, so
obviously we don't spend a lot on individual projects.  When we do it
tends to be in proportion to how it benefits the entire community, and
I'm sure that community sentiments would be balanced accordingly.
However, there aren't "real" projects and "wanna-be" projects in
Gentoo.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rafael Goncalves Martins]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Rafael Goncalves Martins
> <rafaelmartins@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> Yeah, but I think that there's a big difference about any developer
>> being allowed to create a project under the gentoo umbrella and create
>> a project and claim it as Gentoo sponsored without any review of the
>> council. I agree that it can exists in the Github account, or even in
>> our own infrastructure, but say that Gentoo supports it without a
>> previous analysis of the council is wrong IMHO.
>
> In practice there is no difference.  About the only "sponsorship"
> Gentoo projects get most of the time is hosting, and considering that
> they stuck this one on Github they're not really even getting that.
>
> That said, I see no reason why this project would be any less eligible
> for other forms of sponsorship than other projects are, assuming that
> somebody can make a compelling pitch for the Trustees.  The Foundation
> is aimed to further Gentoo in particular in FOSS in general, so
> obviously we don't spend a lot on individual projects.  When we do it
> tends to be in proportion to how it benefits the entire community, and
> I'm sure that community sentiments would be balanced accordingly.
> However, there aren't "real" projects and "wanna-be" projects in
> Gentoo.
>
> Rich
>

Hmm, pretty cool! Then I can create a stupid project, put it on gentoo
infra and claim it as being Gentoo sponsored. Good to know, thanks!

-- 
Rafael Goncalves Martins
Gentoo Linux developer
http://rafaelmartins.eng.br/

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rafael Goncalves Martins]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Rafael Goncalves Martins
<rafaelmartins@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Rafael Goncalves Martins
>> <rafaelmartins@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> Yeah, but I think that there's a big difference about any developer
>>> being allowed to create a project under the gentoo umbrella and create
>>> a project and claim it as Gentoo sponsored without any review of the
>>> council. I agree that it can exists in the Github account, or even in
>>> our own infrastructure, but say that Gentoo supports it without a
>>> previous analysis of the council is wrong IMHO.
>>
>> In practice there is no difference.  About the only "sponsorship"
>> Gentoo projects get most of the time is hosting, and considering that
>> they stuck this one on Github they're not really even getting that.
>>
>> That said, I see no reason why this project would be any less eligible
>> for other forms of sponsorship than other projects are, assuming that
>> somebody can make a compelling pitch for the Trustees.  The Foundation
>> is aimed to further Gentoo in particular in FOSS in general, so
>> obviously we don't spend a lot on individual projects.  When we do it
>> tends to be in proportion to how it benefits the entire community, and
>> I'm sure that community sentiments would be balanced accordingly.
>> However, there aren't "real" projects and "wanna-be" projects in
>> Gentoo.
>>
>> Rich
>>
>
> Hmm, pretty cool! Then I can create a stupid project, put it on gentoo
> infra and claim it as being Gentoo sponsored. Good to know, thanks!
>

Just to make it clear: I'm not saying that any of the people involved
with udev-ng/eudev/whatever, or even the project itself, is stupid. I
was just interpreting rich0's answer.

Do whatever you people want, I'll stop caring about this topic.

Best Regards,

-- 
Rafael Goncalves Martins
Gentoo Linux developer
http://rafaelmartins.eng.br/

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Rafael Goncalves Martins
<rafaelmartins@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Rafael Goncalves Martins
>> Hmm, pretty cool! Then I can create a stupid project, put it on gentoo
>> infra and claim it as being Gentoo sponsored. Good to know, thanks!
>>
>
> Just to make it clear: I'm not saying that any of the people involved
> with udev-ng/eudev/whatever, or even the project itself, is stupid. I
> was just interpreting rich0's answer.
>

However, your interpretation is perfectly correct - from GLEP 39:

Note that this GLEP does not provide for a way for the community at
large to block a new project, even if the comments are wholly
negative.

Arguably if somebody wants to be disruptive they can accomplish a lot
more by trolling the lists than by starting projects.  Judging by the
general traffic on -dev, I'd say that everybody figured that out a
long time ago.

Oh, while anybody can start a project, the fact is that they all still
fall under either the Council or Trustees, and they must abide by the
policies set by both.  Developers who cause trouble are still subject
to Devrel.

As somebody pointed out to me in email - the barriers to becoming a
dev are high, but once you're in you have fairly free reign.  I'd like
to think that most of us would use that for the benefit of the
community.  What I can tell you for sure is that no amount of rules or
bureaucracy is going to solve people problems - at best they just
stifle them, and everything else.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/18/2012 12:37 PM, Rafael Goncalves Martins wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Rafael Goncalves Martins
>> <rafaelmartins@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> Yeah, but I think that there's a big difference about any developer
>>> being allowed to create a project under the gentoo umbrella and create
>>> a project and claim it as Gentoo sponsored without any review of the
>>> council. I agree that it can exists in the Github account, or even in
>>> our own infrastructure, but say that Gentoo supports it without a
>>> previous analysis of the council is wrong IMHO.
>>
>> In practice there is no difference.  About the only "sponsorship"
>> Gentoo projects get most of the time is hosting, and considering that
>> they stuck this one on Github they're not really even getting that.
>>
>> That said, I see no reason why this project would be any less eligible
>> for other forms of sponsorship than other projects are, assuming that
>> somebody can make a compelling pitch for the Trustees.  The Foundation
>> is aimed to further Gentoo in particular in FOSS in general, so
>> obviously we don't spend a lot on individual projects.  When we do it
>> tends to be in proportion to how it benefits the entire community, and
>> I'm sure that community sentiments would be balanced accordingly.
>> However, there aren't "real" projects and "wanna-be" projects in
>> Gentoo.
>>
>> Rich
>>
> 
> Hmm, pretty cool! Then I can create a stupid project, put it on gentoo
> infra and claim it as being Gentoo sponsored. Good to know, thanks!
> 

Those are the rules. We checked before we started.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Peter Stuge]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> > I think that there's a big difference about any developer
> > being allowed to create a project under the gentoo umbrella and
> > create a project and claim it as Gentoo sponsored without any
> > review of the council. I agree that it can exists in the Github
> > account, or even in our own infrastructure, but say that Gentoo
> > supports it without a previous analysis of the council is wrong
> > IMHO.
> 
> In practice there is no difference.

This thread demonstrates that there was significant *perceived*
difference, and as has been pointed out Greg was just the voice
of the internets. (Thanks Greg!)

In practise, it is a git repo with commits by a few individuals.

But because of where the git repo is located, because of the contents
of the commits, and perhaps also because of misunderstanding, it was
*perceived* to be something other than what it is.


I think it's important to be attentive when such misperception
occurs, both to be able to stop it from occuring again in the future,
and to attempt clarification of things as quickly as possible.


> About the only "sponsorship" Gentoo projects get most of the time
> is hosting, and considering that they stuck this one on Github
> they're not really even getting that.

The Gentoo brand is a lot more than infra's lovely hosting.


> That said, I see no reason why this project would be any less
> eligible for other forms of sponsorship than other projects are,
> assuming that somebody can make a compelling pitch for the Trustees.

I don't think the issue was ever with eligibility, but with how
$internet perceived that the Gentoo brand was acting.

Yes, that's layers of fail, but the world isn't big on facts. In the
end the brand that we all know and love got an unneccessary new dent,
and the only thing we can do is to learn from that, to try to avoid
that it happens again.


> However, there aren't "real" projects and "wanna-be" projects in Gentoo.

Is this a good thing? I think both yes and no. A case could certainly
be made for having sunrise projects, like there are sunrise ebuilds.


//Peter

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 23:57 Sat 17 Nov     , Greg KH wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:02:19PM -0800, Alec Warner wrote:
> > I'm unsure on what grounds you disapprove. People start (and abandon)
> > projects often in Gentoo. Suddenly you dislike one such project and
> > object to this practice? Certainly if we had to get some sort of
> > Foundation consensus (for anything) nothing would happen. We can't
> > even get more than 40% of foundation members to vote.
> 
> I object if this is seen as a "Gentoo blessed" fork of a community
> project that is worked on by all other major Linux distros.  That is the
> type of decision that can be made by the Gentoo Council, which is fine,
> but it sure would be nice if it were publicly stated, instead of having
> to see it on the Gentoo github site instead.
> 
> And if that is the decision of the council, I would expect the ability
> to have some type of discussion about it, wouldn't you?

Sorry to follow up late but I feel like the critical point never made it 
clearly into this discussion.

The key misunderstanding here seems to be that initiation of a "Gentoo 
project" means that the council explicitly supports it, because in most 
distributions there is no choice available to end users at this level of 
detail.

Instead, in Gentoo, the council-level decision typically happens when 
the *default* changes. Non-default or non-mandatory things are handled 
in a nearly anarchic, ad hoc manner, where anyone can do pretty much 
whatever they want as an official Gentoo project.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Council Member / Sr. Developer, Gentoo Linux <http://dberkholz.com>
Analyst, RedMonk <http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/>

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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 08:20:28PM -0600, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> 
> The key misunderstanding here seems to be that initiation of a "Gentoo 
> project" means that the council explicitly supports it, because in most 
> distributions there is no choice available to end users at this level of 
> detail.
> 
> Instead, in Gentoo, the council-level decision typically happens when 
> the *default* changes. Non-default or non-mandatory things are handled 
> in a nearly anarchic, ad hoc manner, where anyone can do pretty much 
> whatever they want as an official Gentoo project.

Yes, that was a big part of the misunderstanding.  And thankfully the
eudev project has now changed their README to not state that this is an
official Gentoo project, which will cut down on the misunderstanding by
others not familiar with the way that Gentoo handles its projects (i.e.
the whole world :)

thanks,

greg k-h

[gentoo-dev] Re: udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Duncan]

Richard Yao posted on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:35:22 -0500 as excerpted:

>>> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
>>> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an
>>> optional dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do
>>> not want it can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on
>>> others and there is no need for this one.
>> 
>> You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all,
>> right?
> 
> kmod does not exist on my system and eudev builds without a problem. I
> am thinking of writing my own busybox-style code to handle module
> loading in the builtin when the configure script is told not to build
> with kmod. Does this not avoid the dependency?

FWIW...

I run a monolithic kernel here, no modules /to/ load.  As a result, for 
quite some time I had module-init-tools in package.provided, because I 
really didn't need it at all.

Then udev switched to kmod as a build-time dep.  I could no longer 
package.provide kmod as I had module-init-tools, because it was required 
to /build/ udev.  For no valid reason on my system.  Like any unnecessary 
feature that can be used to load an exploit, it's worse than useless.  
But it was required to build, just because someone decided people had no 
valid reason to run a monolithic kernel system any longer, and that 
people who did so apparently no longer mattered, udev-wise.

That's only one such decision of a whole list following a similar 
pattern, simply deciding that some segment of the Linux-using populace or 
another no longer matters, because it's not the segment that the udev 
folks are focused on.  In many cases, they've already said they're not 
interested in patches resolving the issues, too.  Thus, no, submitting 
the patches for inclusion upstream isn't working.  Seems reason enough 
for a fork, to me.

Back on subtopic, yes, I'm definitely interested in a udev fork that 
doesn't force the otherwise useless on my systems kmod as a build-time 
dep.  package.provided worked for years as a workaround for the module-
init-tools @system dep.  And I'd like to get back to not having to have a 
module-loader package installed at all, since I don't have any modules to 
load anyway.

-- 
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

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Matt Turner]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:06 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> Richard Yao posted on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:35:22 -0500 as excerpted:
>
>>>> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
>>>> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an
>>>> optional dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do
>>>> not want it can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on
>>>> others and there is no need for this one.
>>>
>>> You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all,
>>> right?
>>
>> kmod does not exist on my system and eudev builds without a problem. I
>> am thinking of writing my own busybox-style code to handle module
>> loading in the builtin when the configure script is told not to build
>> with kmod. Does this not avoid the dependency?
>
> FWIW...
>
> I run a monolithic kernel here, no modules /to/ load.  As a result, for
> quite some time I had module-init-tools in package.provided, because I
> really didn't need it at all.
>
> Then udev switched to kmod as a build-time dep.  I could no longer
> package.provide kmod as I had module-init-tools, because it was required
> to /build/ udev.  For no valid reason on my system.  Like any unnecessary
> feature that can be used to load an exploit, it's worse than useless.
> But it was required to build, just because someone decided people had no
> valid reason to run a monolithic kernel system any longer, and that
> people who did so apparently no longer mattered, udev-wise.
>
> That's only one such decision of a whole list following a similar
> pattern, simply deciding that some segment of the Linux-using populace or
> another no longer matters, because it's not the segment that the udev
> folks are focused on.  In many cases, they've already said they're not
> interested in patches resolving the issues, too.  Thus, no, submitting
> the patches for inclusion upstream isn't working.  Seems reason enough
> for a fork, to me.
>
> Back on subtopic, yes, I'm definitely interested in a udev fork that
> doesn't force the otherwise useless on my systems kmod as a build-time
> dep.  package.provided worked for years as a workaround for the module-
> init-tools @system dep.  And I'd like to get back to not having to have a
> module-loader package installed at all, since I don't have any modules to
> load anyway.

# du -sh /var/tmp/portage/sys-apps/kmod-11-r1/image/
240K	/var/tmp/portage/sys-apps/kmod-11-r1/image/

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn]

Matt Turner schrieb:
>> Then udev switched to kmod as a build-time dep.  I could no longer
>> package.provide kmod as I had module-init-tools, because it was required
>> to /build/ udev.  For no valid reason on my system.  Like any unnecessary
>> feature that can be used to load an exploit, it's worse than useless.

> # du -sh /var/tmp/portage/sys-apps/kmod-11-r1/image/
> 240K	/var/tmp/portage/sys-apps/kmod-11-r1/image/

I think the complaint was not about the installed size. Some people have
"install as little unnecessary code as possible" as part of their security
concepts.


Best regards,
Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn

[gentoo-dev] Re: udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Duncan]

Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn posted on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 12:14:48 +0100 as
excerpted:

> Matt Turner schrieb:
>>> Then udev switched to kmod as a build-time dep.  I could no longer
>>> package.provide kmod as I had module-init-tools, because it was
>>> required to /build/ udev.  For no valid reason on my system.  Like any
>>> unnecessary feature that can be used to load an exploit, it's worse
>>> than useless.
> 
>> # du -sh /var/tmp/portage/sys-apps/kmod-11-r1/image/
>> 240K	/var/tmp/portage/sys-apps/kmod-11-r1/image/
> 
> I think the complaint was not about the installed size. Some people have
> "install as little unnecessary code as possible" as part of their
> security concepts.

That's true, but as a long-term gentooer, I've found over the years it's 
more than that.  Every single installed package is another package that 
must be repeatedly rebuilt, as upgrades come in and/or as the system core 
toolchain changes over time and one wants to be sure the whole system is 
consistent and still buildable (emerge --emptytree @world).  Every 
installed package I don't use is thus an installed package I'll spend a 
lot of otherwise unnecessary time on, over the years, simply keeping it 
and the system in general upto date.

As one realizes the cost over time, one gets a rather higher motivation 
to keep the system as lean and mean as possible.  I look at it this way, 
it's just that much more incentive to practice what has always been known 
as good security practice in any case, keeping everything off the system 
that doesn't have a solid, known reason, for being there.

kmod itself is trivial in size time and space requirements, but it's the 
principle as much as anything, and in the case of an unneeded module 
loader there's an additional security concern as well, since an 
opportunity to load kernel modules is just that much more opportunity to 
install a kernel module that hides otherwise visible tell-tail (logs, 
strange open ports on netstat, strange startup services, etc) signs of 
being rooted.  Sure, if someone has module-loading access already, it's 
not a big increased risk, but given that it's an unnecessary, any non-
negative non-zero increase in risk or maintenance cost over time is 
unacceptable, and on a monolithic kernel gentoo system, a kernel module 
loader increases both, trivially sure, but when there's no justifiable 
reason for it in the first place...

-- 
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

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Peter Stuge]

Duncan wrote:
> kmod itself is trivial in size time and space requirements, but it's
> the principle as much as anything, and in the case of an unneeded
> module loader there's an additional security concern as well

I'm afraid this is flawed. If you want to hinder modules from being
loaded then you need to disable modules in the kernel, and not rely
on insmod not being installed on the system.

Look at insmod in asmutils, my guess is that actual work of loading a
module is less than 42 instructions.


> risk or maintenance cost .. on a monolithic kernel gentoo system, a
> kernel module loader increases both

Forget about the loader. Your knob is in a different configuration,
specifically CONFIG_MODULES=n in the kernel.


That said, it's a perfectly good point that kmod is a useless
dependency on your system and all like it, and that it would be
nice for Gentoo to know about this and not pull it in.

I guess this could be accomplished with a USE=kernelmodules flag
that makes the dep optional and applies a simple patch or two
before building udev from systemd sources, and I guess that patches
for the udev ebuild are welcome. :)


//Peter

[gentoo-dev] Re: udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Duncan]

Peter Stuge posted on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 19:00:59 +0100 as excerpted:

> Forget about the loader. Your knob is in a different configuration,
> specifically CONFIG_MODULES=n in the kernel.

Just to note now that the specific topic has come up, yes, I am aware of 
and have that kernel option set to disable module loading.  I was simply 
focusing on userland side, and thus didn't believe the kernel option 
apropos to that specific discussion.  Still, just having a module loading 
userland on the system doesn't /increase/ security, and in fact, it 
slightly decreases it, on a system where a deliberate choice has been 
made to turn kernel module loading functionality off.

-- 
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

Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Joshua Kinard]

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On 11/18/2012 2:39 PM, Duncan wrote:
> Peter Stuge posted on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 19:00:59 +0100 as excerpted:
> 
>> Forget about the loader. Your knob is in a different configuration,
>> specifically CONFIG_MODULES=n in the kernel.
> 
> Just to note now that the specific topic has come up, yes, I am aware of 
> and have that kernel option set to disable module loading.  I was simply 
> focusing on userland side, and thus didn't believe the kernel option 
> apropos to that specific discussion.  Still, just having a module loading 
> userland on the system doesn't /increase/ security, and in fact, it 
> slightly decreases it, on a system where a deliberate choice has been 
> made to turn kernel module loading functionality off.

Pointing out as a general statement, and not in response to anyone in
particular, while I, too, am in the camp of minimalistic userlands, there is
a kind of threshold one hits in this regard where keeping or removing
something like a couple of module-loading utilities or systemd text files
around really isn't going to increase or decrease your security /by that
much/. </run-on-sentence>

I mean, if someone gains unauthorized access to the userland and somehow
uses these unused components to launch an attack, successful or not, well,
then there's a LOT of bigger problems to worry about.  The goal of security
isn't to prevent someone from gaining unauthorized access to a system, it's
to deter them or otherwise make the effort required more than the potential
gain.

Design network firewalls well, audit the user accounts and review logs
periodically, enabled hardened options, use PaX/grsec/selinux, deploy an
IDS/IPS and a SEIM, etc...there's a lot of other things one can do that will
have a bigger ROI on security than gutting module-loading tools or systemd
scripts off of a system.  Do I like them there?  Not really (unless I'm
developing a kernel driver, then modules come in handy).  But it is what it is.

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Samuli Suominen]

On 18/11/12 07:19, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:00:52AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
>> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
>> dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
>> can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
>> is no need for this one.
>
> You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all, right?

Exactly what I had in mind. So far I see bunch of regressions (back to 
bundling code :() in the "eudev" repository and more it deviates from 
the orig. upstream the less attractive it's looking...

What should be done, at most, is to cherry-pick and revert the things 
that killed the sep. /usr support, put it behind an USE flag to the 
current udev's ebuild, perhaps IUSE="+vanilla", and be done with it.

- Samuli

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Pacho Ramos]

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El dom, 18-11-2012 a las 11:13 +0200, Samuli Suominen escribió:
> On 18/11/12 07:19, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:00:52AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> >> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
> >> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
> >> dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
> >> can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
> >> is no need for this one.
> >
> > You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all, right?
> 
> Exactly what I had in mind. So far I see bunch of regressions (back to 
> bundling code :() in the "eudev" repository and more it deviates from 
> the orig. upstream the less attractive it's looking...
> 
> What should be done, at most, is to cherry-pick and revert the things 
> that killed the sep. /usr support, put it behind an USE flag to the 
> current udev's ebuild, perhaps IUSE="+vanilla", and be done with it.
> 
> - Samuli
> 
> 

+1

@eudev maintainers, Wouldn't that be possible?

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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Anthony G. Basile]

On 11/18/2012 04:48 AM, Pacho Ramos wrote:
> El dom, 18-11-2012 a las 11:13 +0200, Samuli Suominen escribió:
>> On 18/11/12 07:19, Greg KH wrote:
>>> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:00:52AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>>>> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
>>>> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
>>>> dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
>>>> can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
>>>> is no need for this one.
>>> You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all, right?
>> Exactly what I had in mind. So far I see bunch of regressions (back to
>> bundling code :() in the "eudev" repository and more it deviates from
>> the orig. upstream the less attractive it's looking...
>>
>> What should be done, at most, is to cherry-pick and revert the things
>> that killed the sep. /usr support, put it behind an USE flag to the
>> current udev's ebuild, perhaps IUSE="+vanilla", and be done with it.
>>
>> - Samuli
>>
>>
> +1
>
> @eudev maintainers, Wouldn't that be possible?

What began as me experimenting and moving code around to see what was 
the best approach to begin addressing several issues has suddenly turned 
into a war.  Pacho, I am not sure whether it is possible or the best way 
to proceed.  I say that with neutrality because I haven't figured out 
everything that's there.

The two edged sword here is that, while I want to do the thinking out 
loud where people can see what I'm considering in code changes and 
participate, I opened the flood gate for a lot of anger.  I woke up to 
see the name of the repo changed and a legal threats being thrown around.

I know that by my very sending of this email, I will have a lot of CC's 
coming back at me with criticisms about things I didn't know I had even 
taken a stand on.

There is one pressing issue though.  It is my understanding that the 
council would like to see where this gets in one months time and stayed 
off a vote on udev.  There are strong feelings for openrc and a 
systemd-less udev.  These will not go away irrespective of this project.

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP  : 8040 5A4D 8709 21B1 1A88  33CE 979C AF40 D045 5535
GnuPG ID  : D0455535

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[William Hubbs]

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On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:48:33AM +0100, Pacho Ramos wrote:
> El dom, 18-11-2012 a las 11:13 +0200, Samuli Suominen escribió:
> > On 18/11/12 07:19, Greg KH wrote:
> > > On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:00:52AM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> > >> Having a builtin is a good idea, but the implementation as a mandatory
> > >> dependency on kmod is not. The plan is to reintroduce it as an optional
> > >> dependency, so that distributions (and Gentoo users) that do not want it
> > >> can avoid it. None of us want to force dependencies on others and there
> > >> is no need for this one.
> > >
> > > You do realize that you didn't really drop the dependency at all, right?
> > 
> > Exactly what I had in mind. So far I see bunch of regressions (back to 
> > bundling code :() in the "eudev" repository and more it deviates from 
> > the orig. upstream the less attractive it's looking...
> > 
> > What should be done, at most, is to cherry-pick and revert the things 
> > that killed the sep. /usr support, put it behind an USE flag to the 
> > current udev's ebuild, perhaps IUSE="+vanilla", and be done with it.
> > 
> > - Samuli
> > 
> > 
> 
> +1
> 
> @eudev maintainers, Wouldn't that be possible?

Anything is possible.

The issue right now is the relationship between ryao and the udev team
(at least me).

I don't want to bore the list with the details, but ryao misunderstood
some action (or lack of action) on my part as ignoring him.

Samuli, myself and robbat2 are the udev team for gentoo. What I do not
know is if ryao spoke to the other team members, but what I do know is
that a private irc conversation months ago is fine, but, from my
perspective, it would have made sure that I didn't lose track of things
if bugs had been filed, and they were not, so that is the only reason I
lost track of his concerns.

I asked him several times about joining the udev team, but for whatever
reason, he feels that starting this fork was the best option, and he
has told me he can't stop it.

I'm with gregkh on the  separate /usr issue though. It isn't just udev
that has issues when /usr is split off. I think the myth that udev is
the only culprit came out of the April 2012 council meeting.

I'm pretty sure that what I'm about to say will be dismissed by the
supporters of separate /usr without an initramfs or without using the
sep-usr option we now have in our busybox ebuild, but in truth,
splitting / from /usr is broken another way that we have been ignoring
for a decade.

We have been getting around part of the issue by moving shared libraries
from /usr/lib* to /lib* and using gen_usr_ldscript to make sure the
linker knows what we have done with them.

The other breakage is any program that reads data from /usr/share does
not work right if / and /usr are split and that program starts in early boot.

I don't know what else would have to be fixed off the top of my head,
but  I can tell you that locales/nls are broken for early boot without
an initramfs if / and /usr are split.

Basically, if we want separate /usr without an initramfs and we want to
do it right, we have to create /share and start copying things from
/usr/share/* to /share/* and patching code to support reading both locations,
starting with gettext/NLS support.

So here is the question I'll pose. Is it worth all of that extra
work for us to support separate /usr correctly, or should we just tell
everyone to start using initramfs or, if they don't want to use
initramfs and they are just using plain filesystems, the
busybox[sep-usr] option once all of the tools are stable?

I used separate /usr for a long time here without an initramfs, but
after studying why this was broken, I switched over to an initramfs, and
have been running one for months, because that seems to be the cleanest
way forward.

There is one other issue right now,
and I don't know what util-linux is doing with it since our bug hasn't
been updated in some time [1].

William

[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=410605

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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 12:22 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> So here is the question I'll pose. Is it worth all of that extra
> work for us to support separate /usr correctly, or should we just tell
> everyone to start using initramfs or, if they don't want to use
> initramfs and they are just using plain filesystems, the
> busybox[sep-usr] option once all of the tools are stable?

My two cents:

My thoughts - no, it isn't worth all that work.  However, I'm not the
one doing the work, so I'll let those who are judge for themselves
whether it is worth it, and I'm not going to knock volunteer work done
to benefit the Gentoo community.  I hope they succeed.  I also hope
they don't diverge so far that it affects other packages, and I trust
everybody to work together to prevent that.

As far as separate /usr goes and all that, I just see this as one more
option to offer our users alongside mdev, initramfs, an early boot
script, or whatever.  Add it to the news item, and let the users
decide what they want to do.  As far as I'm concerned eudev is just
another option like systemd, and if at some point in the future a
majority of the community/devs are behind changing the defaults, then
we can consider that.  Otherwise, stick it in news items, docs, wiki
pages, or even the handbook as makes sense.  Gentoo is about choice.

Would I rather see some of these devs working on something else, like
my favorite package?  Maybe.  But, if so I'm better off sending them
an email to try to persuade them, or throwing money at them.  What we
ought not to do is knock their work.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Wulf C. Krueger]

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On 18.11.2012 06:00, Richard Yao wrote:
> but we are doing AGILE development, so long term goals have not
> been well defined.
[...]
> With that said, Linux distributions are victims of people
> continually trying to reinvent the wheel with no formal planning.

Can you spot the problem?

Regards, Wulf

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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Walter Dnes]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 07:29:22PM -0800, Greg KH wrote

> But, along those lines, what is the goal of the fork?  What are you
> trying to attempt to do with a fork of udev that could not be
> accomplished by:
>   - getting patches approved upstream
> or:
>   - keeping a simple set of patches outside of the upstream tree and
>     applying them to each release

  That approach would be viable if upstream were co-operative or gave a
damn about anybody else.  They've broken people's sytems with the "new
and improved" udev, and claimed that people's systems were already
broken.  Kay Sievers got Linus angry enough to go on a rant.  See
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/484

> So now, after you've dismissed the patch that did the equivalent
> fix in udev (Ming Lei's patch basically disabled your idiotic and
> wrong sequence number test for firmware loading), you say it's ok
> to bypass udev entirely, because that is "more robust".
> 
> Kay, you are so full of sh*t that it's not funny. You're refusing
> to acknowledge your bugs, you refuse to fix them even when a patch
> is sent to you, and then you make excuses for the fact that we have
> to work around *your* bugs, and say that we should have done so from
> the very beginning.
> 
> Yes, doing it in the kernel is "more robust". But don't play games,
> and stop the lying. It's more robust because we have maintainers that
> care, and because we know that regressions are not something we can
> play fast and loose with. If something breaks, and we don't know what
> the right fix for that breakage is, we *revert* the thing that broke.
> 
> So yes, we're clearly better off doing it in the kernel.
> 
> Not because firmware loading cannot be done in user space. But simply
> because udev maintenance since Greg gave it up has gone downhill.

  And as for Gentoo expecting co-operation, see Lennart's attitude
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-dev/2009-June/023434.html
> If you don't do RT development or doing
> RT development only for embedded cases, or if you are a
> Gentoo-Build-It-All-Myself-Because-It-Is-So-Much-Faster-And-Need-To-Reinvent-The-Wheel-Daily-And-Configurating-Things-Is-Awesome-Guy
> then it doesn't mean anything for you.

  In short, the systemd-udev people are hard to work with in general,
and have a dislike for Gentoo.  Good luck with getting patches accepted
by them.

> Oh, and if _anyone_ thinks that changing udev is going to "solve" the
> "no separate /usr without an initrd" issue, I have a bridge I want to
> sell them.

  If udev-systemd merely broke a filesystem layout that functioned very
well in linux for 2 decades, you would not be seeing this rebellion.
udev-systemd is also breaking media drivers.  The entire thread
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/2/194 gives an idea of just how badly Kay
has screwed up udev. You participated in that thread.

> I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
> binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
> surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?

  Wrong.  You're assuming that Sievers/Poettering would allow that.
They've made no secret of their disdain of standalone udev.  Everybody
has seen Poettering's post...
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html
> (Yes, udev on non-systemd systems is in our eyes a dead end, in case
> you haven't noticed it yet. I am looking forward to the day when we
> can drop that support entirely.)

How many people have read Siever's post?
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-July/006065.html
> We promised to keep udev properly *running* as standalone, we never
> told that it can be *build* standalone. And that still stands.
> 
> We never claimed, that all the surrounding things like documentation
> always fully match, if only udev is picked out of systemd.
> 
> I would welcome if people stop reading that "promise" into the
> announcement, it just wasn't written there.

  You (the former udev maintainer) are saying that a standalone udev
*WITHOUT SYSTEMD* will always be possible.  The current maintainer is
saying that isn't necessarily true.  Who do you expect me to believe?

  You also wrote...

> And is something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of
> a working udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes,
> it is a regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of
> more processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)

  Some people are finding firmware drivers not loading, and the cards  
not functioning.  Don't you consider that a regression?  Seiver's
response is basically the same as for people with separate /usr; telling
them that they have to re-write their drivers to accomadate the "new and
improved" udev.  And people whose drivers don't fail entirely now get a
60-second delay while udev times out before loading the firmware in
another manner.  Those people have seen their bootup times increased by
a full minute.  Do you not consider that a regression?

> As I posted elsewhere, working on a project based on "hate" only lasts
> so long.  I should know, that's the reason I started udev in the first
> place over 9 years ago.

  The Xfree86 people generated a lot of hate, just like Sievers and
Poettering.  Xorg hasn't burned out yet.

> You need to have a real solid goal in place in order to be able to keep
> this up in the long-run.  Otherwise you are going to burn yourself out,
> and end up alienating a lot of people along the way.

  Howsabout a standalone udev, with no dependancies on systemd, and it
won't break people's systems?

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
We are apparently better off trying to avoid udev like the plague.
Linus Torvalds; 2012/10/03 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/349

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Matt Turner]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
>> As I posted elsewhere, working on a project based on "hate" only lasts
>> so long.  I should know, that's the reason I started udev in the first
>> place over 9 years ago.
>
>   The Xfree86 people generated a lot of hate, just like Sievers and
> Poettering.  Xorg hasn't burned out yet.

Let's be fair. The Xorg fork was done by a lot of really competent
professional developers who had been developing XFree86 for a long
time.

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
>>> As I posted elsewhere, working on a project based on "hate" only lasts
>>> so long.  I should know, that's the reason I started udev in the first
>>> place over 9 years ago.
>>
>>   The Xfree86 people generated a lot of hate, just like Sievers and
>> Poettering.  Xorg hasn't burned out yet.
>
> Let's be fair. The Xorg fork was done by a lot of really competent
> professional developers who had been developing XFree86 for a long
> time.

And it was made because it had become almost impossible to work with
the main developer of XFree86; not because of hate, but by very clear
and valid technical reasons The systemd+udev project instead has code
contributed by every major Linux distribution, and many small ones.
Even Ubuntu hasn't talked about forking udev, and they keep sending
patches, even with their staunch commitment to Upstart. This is what a
developer from Arch Linux (which has just made the decision to move to
systemd) has to say about it:

"... systemd is a cross-distro project: every major and many, many
minor distros have had people contributing to systemd. last i heard
even two debian devs have commit access to the repo, among many
others. systemd upstream is very accommodating of different needs and
different use-cases (as long as they are presented on technical
grounds) and have been a pleasure to work with so far. We are getting
the joint experience of a lot of people/projects who have worked on
different init systems for a long time, I think this is one of the
most important "features" one could have."

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

Seeing some people comparing udev to XFree86 is one of the more
bizarre things coming out from this fork, and that's saying. However,
I agree with Doug that anyone should code whatever they want to code.
Who knows, maybe something interesting would come off from this fork,
and it certainly doesn't affect us happy Gentoo+systemd+udev users.

Regards.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Walter Dnes]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 01:51:14AM -0600, Canek Pel??ez Vald??s wrote
> 
> "... systemd is a cross-distro project: every major and many, many
> minor distros have had people contributing to systemd. last i heard
> even two debian devs have commit access to the repo, among many
> others. systemd upstream is very accommodating of different needs and
> different use-cases (as long as they are presented on technical
> grounds) and have been a pleasure to work with so far. We are getting
> the joint experience of a lot of people/projects who have worked on
> different init systems for a long time, I think this is one of the
> most important "features" one could have."
> 
> https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

  You're missing the point entirely.  Yes, the systemd people are
working for the good of systemd.  Nobody denies that.  Your post does
not address the fact that Kay and Lennart hold standalone udev in
contempt, and treat it as a 2nd-class citizen.  Note that Richard Yao is
*NOT* forking systemd.  He is forking udev, which addresses the issue of
Kay's+Lennart's hostility to standalone udev on non-systemd setups.  I,
and a lot of other people, would like to use a sane standalone udev
(from the Greg KH days) without systemd's dependancies/restrictions.
That is the "target market" for a udev fork.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
We are apparently better off trying to avoid udev like the plague.
Linus Torvalds; 2012/10/03 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/349

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 08:13:55PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 01:51:14AM -0600, Canek Pel??ez Vald??s wrote
> > 
> > "... systemd is a cross-distro project: every major and many, many
> > minor distros have had people contributing to systemd. last i heard
> > even two debian devs have commit access to the repo, among many
> > others. systemd upstream is very accommodating of different needs and
> > different use-cases (as long as they are presented on technical
> > grounds) and have been a pleasure to work with so far. We are getting
> > the joint experience of a lot of people/projects who have worked on
> > different init systems for a long time, I think this is one of the
> > most important "features" one could have."
> > 
> > https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530
> 
>   You're missing the point entirely.  Yes, the systemd people are
> working for the good of systemd.  Nobody denies that.  Your post does
> not address the fact that Kay and Lennart hold standalone udev in
> contempt, and treat it as a 2nd-class citizen.  Note that Richard Yao is
> *NOT* forking systemd.  He is forking udev, which addresses the issue of
> Kay's+Lennart's hostility to standalone udev on non-systemd setups.  I,
> and a lot of other people, would like to use a sane standalone udev
> (from the Greg KH days) without systemd's dependancies/restrictions.
> That is the "target market" for a udev fork.

Heh, you really don't want udev from back in the "Greg KH days".
Seriously, if you want that, go use mdev, but even then, it has more
features than when I was still running the udev project.

I find it a bit funny that people are so stuck on using udev now, they
seem to have forgotten all of these same kinds of arguments way back
when udev first came out ("No one is going to force me to use udev!").
Thanks to Kay's fine work, that is no longer an issue at all.  Without
him, you wouldn't be arguing to keep using it so much.

And note, Kay and Lennart are _not_ treating udev as a second-class
citizen.  It's required for systemd to work properly, and other distros
(like Ubuntu), use it for their systems to work properly in a
stand-alone manner.  So breaking that will not happen, lots of people
will ensure that that does not happen, myself included.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Walter Dnes]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 07:11:13PM -0800, Greg KH wrote

> And note, Kay and Lennart are _not_ treating udev as a second-class
> citizen.

  I said *STAND-ALONE* udev.  Please re-read the two posts...
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-July/006065.html

> It's required for systemd to work properly, and other distros (like
> Ubuntu), use it for their systems to work properly in a stand-alone
> manner.  So breaking that will not happen, lots of people will ensure
> that that does not happen, myself included.

  Kay and company have been rather cavalier in breaking systems in the
past.  Richard Yao is working on an insurance policy, just in case Kay
and company do it again.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
We are apparently better off trying to avoid udev like the plague.
Linus Torvalds; 2012/10/03 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/349

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 02:05:39AM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 07:29:22PM -0800, Greg KH wrote
> 
> > But, along those lines, what is the goal of the fork?  What are you
> > trying to attempt to do with a fork of udev that could not be
> > accomplished by:
> >   - getting patches approved upstream
> > or:
> >   - keeping a simple set of patches outside of the upstream tree and
> >     applying them to each release
> 
>   That approach would be viable if upstream were co-operative or gave a
> damn about anybody else.  They've broken people's sytems with the "new
> and improved" udev, and claimed that people's systems were already
> broken.  Kay Sievers got Linus angry enough to go on a rant.  See
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/484

Yes, I know all about the firmware issue with media drivers.  It's now
resolved and fixed, in two different ways (the kernel now loads firmware
directly, and on older kernels, udev has fixed the issue.)  So that's no
longer an issue for anyone.

>   In short, the systemd-udev people are hard to work with in general,
> and have a dislike for Gentoo.  Good luck with getting patches accepted
> by them.

The fact that Gentoo is alone in wanting to build udev, without systemd
dependencies being on the system, is something that if I were the
systemd maintainer, I would reject.  It's also a pretty simple set of
patches that Gentoo can keep around if it's really a serious issue for
people.

> > Oh, and if _anyone_ thinks that changing udev is going to "solve" the
> > "no separate /usr without an initrd" issue, I have a bridge I want to
> > sell them.
> 
>   If udev-systemd merely broke a filesystem layout that functioned very
> well in linux for 2 decades, you would not be seeing this rebellion.

Note, a separate /usr has been broken for a while now, udev is just
pointing the issue out.  And again, if you want a separate /usr, just
use an initrd, the solution is simple.

> udev-systemd is also breaking media drivers.  The entire thread
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/2/194 gives an idea of just how badly Kay
> has screwed up udev. You participated in that thread.

Again, this is now resolved, no need to keep beating it :)

> How many people have read Siever's post?
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-July/006065.html
> > We promised to keep udev properly *running* as standalone, we never
> > told that it can be *build* standalone. And that still stands.
> > 
> > We never claimed, that all the surrounding things like documentation
> > always fully match, if only udev is picked out of systemd.
> > 
> > I would welcome if people stop reading that "promise" into the
> > announcement, it just wasn't written there.
> 
>   You (the former udev maintainer) are saying that a standalone udev
> *WITHOUT SYSTEMD* will always be possible.  The current maintainer is
> saying that isn't necessarily true.  Who do you expect me to believe?

They are saying it as well.  It's Gentoo that is unique in wanting to
build it without the rest of the systemd package as well.  Two different
things here.

>   You also wrote...
> 
> > And is something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of
> > a working udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes,
> > it is a regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of
> > more processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)
> 
>   Some people are finding firmware drivers not loading, and the cards  
> not functioning.  Don't you consider that a regression?

Again, been a bug for 6 months, hit by very few people, now resolved,
not an issue.

> Seiver's response is basically the same as for people with separate
> /usr; telling them that they have to re-write their drivers to
> accomadate the "new and improved" udev.  And people whose drivers
> don't fail entirely now get a 60-second delay while udev times out
> before loading the firmware in another manner.  Those people have seen
> their bootup times increased by a full minute.  Do you not consider
> that a regression?

Again, now resolved, not an issue.

> > You need to have a real solid goal in place in order to be able to keep
> > this up in the long-run.  Otherwise you are going to burn yourself out,
> > and end up alienating a lot of people along the way.
> 
>   Howsabout a standalone udev, with no dependancies on systemd, and it
> won't break people's systems?

If that is the goal, great, it would be wonderful if someone would say
that.  But from looking at the commits so far in the repo, it really
doesn't look like that is the goal.  Or if it is, it's getting there in
a very odd way.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Alec Warner]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:52 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 02:05:39AM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 07:29:22PM -0800, Greg KH wrote
>>
>> > But, along those lines, what is the goal of the fork?  What are you
>> > trying to attempt to do with a fork of udev that could not be
>> > accomplished by:
>> >   - getting patches approved upstream
>> > or:
>> >   - keeping a simple set of patches outside of the upstream tree and
>> >     applying them to each release
>>
>>   That approach would be viable if upstream were co-operative or gave a
> damn about anybody else.  They've broken people's sytems with the "new
>> and improved" udev, and claimed that people's systems were already
>> broken.  Kay Sievers got Linus angry enough to go on a rant.  See
>> https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/484
>
> Yes, I know all about the firmware issue with media drivers.  It's now
> resolved and fixed, in two different ways (the kernel now loads firmware
> directly, and on older kernels, udev has fixed the issue.)  So that's no
> longer an issue for anyone.
>
>>   In short, the systemd-udev people are hard to work with in general,
>> and have a dislike for Gentoo.  Good luck with getting patches accepted
>> by them.
>
> The fact that Gentoo is alone in wanting to build udev, without systemd
> dependencies being on the system, is something that if I were the
> systemd maintainer, I would reject.  It's also a pretty simple set of
> patches that Gentoo can keep around if it's really a serious issue for
> people.
>
>> > Oh, and if _anyone_ thinks that changing udev is going to "solve" the
>> > "no separate /usr without an initrd" issue, I have a bridge I want to
>> > sell them.
>>
>>   If udev-systemd merely broke a filesystem layout that functioned very
>> well in linux for 2 decades, you would not be seeing this rebellion.
>
> Note, a separate /usr has been broken for a while now, udev is just
> pointing the issue out.  And again, if you want a separate /usr, just
> use an initrd, the solution is simple.
>
>> udev-systemd is also breaking media drivers.  The entire thread
>> https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/2/194 gives an idea of just how badly Kay
>> has screwed up udev. You participated in that thread.
>
> Again, this is now resolved, no need to keep beating it :)
>
>> How many people have read Siever's post?
>> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-July/006065.html
>> > We promised to keep udev properly *running* as standalone, we never
>> > told that it can be *build* standalone. And that still stands.
>> >
>> > We never claimed, that all the surrounding things like documentation
>> > always fully match, if only udev is picked out of systemd.
>> >
>> > I would welcome if people stop reading that "promise" into the
>> > announcement, it just wasn't written there.
>>
>>   You (the former udev maintainer) are saying that a standalone udev
>> *WITHOUT SYSTEMD* will always be possible.  The current maintainer is
>> saying that isn't necessarily true.  Who do you expect me to believe?
>
> They are saying it as well.  It's Gentoo that is unique in wanting to
> build it without the rest of the systemd package as well.  Two different
> things here.
>
>>   You also wrote...
>>
>> > And is something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of
>> > a working udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes,
>> > it is a regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of
>> > more processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)
>>
>>   Some people are finding firmware drivers not loading, and the cards
>> not functioning.  Don't you consider that a regression?
>
> Again, been a bug for 6 months, hit by very few people, now resolved,
> not an issue.
>
>> Seiver's response is basically the same as for people with separate
>> /usr; telling them that they have to re-write their drivers to
>> accomadate the "new and improved" udev.  And people whose drivers
>> don't fail entirely now get a 60-second delay while udev times out
>> before loading the firmware in another manner.  Those people have seen
>> their bootup times increased by a full minute.  Do you not consider
>> that a regression?
>
> Again, now resolved, not an issue.
>
>> > You need to have a real solid goal in place in order to be able to keep
>> > this up in the long-run.  Otherwise you are going to burn yourself out,
>> > and end up alienating a lot of people along the way.
>>
>>   Howsabout a standalone udev, with no dependancies on systemd, and it
>> won't break people's systems?
>
> If that is the goal, great, it would be wonderful if someone would say
> that.  But from looking at the commits so far in the repo, it really
> doesn't look like that is the goal.  Or if it is, it's getting there in
> a very odd way.

The project is like a day old, chillax.

>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
>

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Walter Dnes]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:52:22PM -0800, Greg KH wrote
> 
> Yes, I know all about the firmware issue with media drivers.  It's now
> resolved and fixed, in two different ways (the kernel now loads firmware
> directly, and on older kernels, udev has fixed the issue.)  So that's no
> longer an issue for anyone.

  The fact that they went ahead with changes, knowing full well it would
break stuff, is reason enough to distrust them in future.  It should not
require a rant from Linus, or a workaround in the kernel, to get them to
fix their bugs.

> It's also a pretty simple set of patches that Gentoo can keep around
> if it's really a serious issue for people.

  That may be true today.  But as udev gets more tightly integrated into
systemd, those patches will become a "dead end", to use Lennart's words.

> Note, a separate /usr has been broken for a while now, udev is just
> pointing the issue out.  And again, if you want a separate /usr, just
> use an initrd, the solution is simple.

  ????  I have 4 "broken" Gentoo systems running just fine, without an
initrd, thank you.  There have always been a few edge-case setups that
won't work with a separate /usr, without an initrd.  What annoys me is
this dog-in-the-manger attitude that if a separate /usr is broken for a
few people, then by golly, it should be broken for everybody.

> The fact that Gentoo is alone in wanting to build udev, without systemd
> dependencies being on the system, is something that if I were the
> systemd maintainer, I would reject.

  There is obviously no point in us continuing this debate.  You are in
favour of systemd, I am not.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
We are apparently better off trying to avoid udev like the plague.
Linus Torvalds; 2012/10/03 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/349

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 08:50:07PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:52:22PM -0800, Greg KH wrote
> > 
> > Yes, I know all about the firmware issue with media drivers.  It's now
> > resolved and fixed, in two different ways (the kernel now loads firmware
> > directly, and on older kernels, udev has fixed the issue.)  So that's no
> > longer an issue for anyone.
> 
>   The fact that they went ahead with changes, knowing full well it would
> break stuff, is reason enough to distrust them in future.  It should not
> require a rant from Linus, or a workaround in the kernel, to get them to
> fix their bugs.

That's the "fun" of working with people you don't have direct control
over.  Bugs get fixed on different schedules than what you sometimes
like.  This specific issue, as it was hit by only a very small number of
people, and two distros had work-around patches in their udev packages,
was missed by a lot of people, myself included.  I honestly thought that
it had been fixed months ago.

Sometimes a rant, or just reminding people, is all that is needed to get
issues fixed.  And it worked here quite well, don't you think?

Actually, I would argue that it worked even better than if the issue had
been worked-around in udev in the very beginning when it first came up.
Now the kernel has changed to allow udev to remove the whole firmware
loading logic, which arguably, should have been done in the very
beginning.  So you might say that because of people forgetting about
this, and people ranting, everyone is much better off in the end.

It's a bizarre development model, I know. :)

> > It's also a pretty simple set of patches that Gentoo can keep around
> > if it's really a serious issue for people.
> 
>   That may be true today.  But as udev gets more tightly integrated into
> systemd, those patches will become a "dead end", to use Lennart's words.

What patches?  udevd builds for me just fine without building the
systemd binary.  The developers even have a whole web page set up for
how to do this properly if you need to do so.

> > Note, a separate /usr has been broken for a while now, udev is just
> > pointing the issue out.  And again, if you want a separate /usr, just
> > use an initrd, the solution is simple.
> 
>   ????  I have 4 "broken" Gentoo systems running just fine, without an
> initrd, thank you.  There have always been a few edge-case setups that
> won't work with a separate /usr, without an initrd.  What annoys me is
> this dog-in-the-manger attitude that if a separate /usr is broken for a
> few people, then by golly, it should be broken for everybody.

Again, udev isn't the problem here.  It hasn't broken the standalone
/usr issue at all.  There isn't anything in udev to change for this.  I
don't understand why you are thinking that udev has anything to do with
this issue at all.  It's other packages that are the problem here.  Are
people forking and changing them to resolve the problem?  If not, why
not?

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Joshua Kinard]

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On 11/18/2012 10:06 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 08:50:07PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> 
> It's a bizarre development model, I know. :)
> 

Works better than Windows' model:
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

(Okay, old, and I know MS has since fixed this, but it's still funny)


>>> Note, a separate /usr has been broken for a while now, udev is just
>>> pointing the issue out.  And again, if you want a separate /usr, just
>>> use an initrd, the solution is simple.
>>
>>   ????  I have 4 "broken" Gentoo systems running just fine, without an
>> initrd, thank you.  There have always been a few edge-case setups that
>> won't work with a separate /usr, without an initrd.  What annoys me is
>> this dog-in-the-manger attitude that if a separate /usr is broken for a
>> few people, then by golly, it should be broken for everybody.
> 
> Again, udev isn't the problem here.  It hasn't broken the standalone
> /usr issue at all.  There isn't anything in udev to change for this.  I
> don't understand why you are thinking that udev has anything to do with
> this issue at all.  It's other packages that are the problem here.  Are
> people forking and changing them to resolve the problem?  If not, why
> not?

Correct me if wrong, but didn't the issue start with udev wanting to put the
PCI ID database/file into /usr/share from /etc?  Then kmod was changed to
link against libs in /usr/lib, and then udev made dependent on kmod?  I
think that led to a scenario where openrc starts udev up before localmount
has run, and then things fall apart.

Not that I'm saying that implicates udev as the center of the sep-usr thing,
but if my memory is correct, that's kinda what got the ball rolling down the
hill.  Or something close to it, anyways.

In any event, I did the switch to mdev, and it works.  It is a hack, though,
I'll admit that.  But if you're one of those types that runs a fairly
vanilla, not-very-fancy system that has had a separate /usr for a number of
years (2005 for most of my machines), it's a relatively painless transition
and it doesn't require the initramfs and it avoids having to
backup/format/restore each system.  Obviously, if I need more advanced
functionality on any of my systems, I'll probably have to switch back, but
we'll see what the future holds.

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

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On 18/11/2012 19:38, Joshua Kinard wrote:
> Correct me if wrong, but didn't the issue start with udev wanting to put the
> PCI ID database/file into /usr/share from /etc?  Then kmod was changed to
> link against libs in /usr/lib, and then udev made dependent on kmod?  I
> think that led to a scenario where openrc starts udev up before localmount
> has run, and then things fall apart.

I honestly can't remember if pci.ids was ever in /etc — I always knew it
in /usr/share/misc...

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 07:42:11PM -0800, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> On 18/11/2012 19:38, Joshua Kinard wrote:
> > Correct me if wrong, but didn't the issue start with udev wanting to put the
> > PCI ID database/file into /usr/share from /etc?  Then kmod was changed to
> > link against libs in /usr/lib, and then udev made dependent on kmod?  I
> > think that led to a scenario where openrc starts udev up before localmount
> > has run, and then things fall apart.
> 
> I honestly can't remember if pci.ids was ever in /etc — I always knew it
> in /usr/share/misc...

Yes, it was always in /usr/somewhere.

And the pci.ids file came from the pciutils package, not udev.

But note, we are moving that file out of pciutils (and the usb.ids file
out of usbutils) and they will eventually be generated from the udev
package itself, as it holds the master hardware database.  But that's a
totally different topic than the one at hand, and is still being worked
on by the developers of the different upstream packages.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

On 18/11/2012 20:28, Greg KH wrote:
> But note, we are moving that file out of pciutils (and the usb.ids file
> out of usbutils) and they will eventually be generated from the udev
> package itself, as it holds the master hardware database.  But that's a
> totally different topic than the one at hand, and is still being worked
> on by the developers of the different upstream packages.

*cough* Gentoo already moved them out of the respective packages into
hwids btw, which I've been bumping almost daily for a while and weekly
now because I got bored.

And while at it I'm also always submitting any new data to the master
databases since I end up often enough having some extra gadget around...

(If you're thinking of replacing pci/usb ids with a formatted complex
database, yai! Finally you guys followed my suggestion from 2008 ;)).

</off topic>

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Joshua Kinard]

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On 11/18/2012 11:28 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> Yes, it was always in /usr/somewhere.
> 
> And the pci.ids file came from the pciutils package, not udev.
> 
> But note, we are moving that file out of pciutils (and the usb.ids file
> out of usbutils) and they will eventually be generated from the udev
> package itself, as it holds the master hardware database.  But that's a
> totally different topic than the one at hand, and is still being worked
> on by the developers of the different upstream packages.

Okay, maybe it's just the kmod thing I am thinking of then.  Thanks!

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:38 PM, Joshua Kinard <kumba@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Correct me if wrong, but didn't the issue start with udev wanting to put the
> PCI ID database/file into /usr/share from /etc?

Well, I can't vouch for what the first issue that arose was, but I do
recall discussion that bluetooth keyboards also required libraries in
/usr.

Right now it takes less common situations to trigger problems with a
separate /usr, but the general trend is not favorable.  It isn't just
software changes either - if I told somebody 15 years ago that USB
keyboards were going to be problematic but standard PS2 keyboards
would always work just fine, they'd say there was nothing to worry
about since PS2 keyboards would always be around.  For all we know in
5 years you won't be able to buy a USB keyboard.

So, udev has been pushing things along to some extent, but the problem
is definitely bigger than udev.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[William Hubbs]

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On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 09:39:59AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:38 PM, Joshua Kinard <kumba@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Correct me if wrong, but didn't the issue start with udev wanting to put the
> > PCI ID database/file into /usr/share from /etc?
> 
> Well, I can't vouch for what the first issue that arose was, but I do
> recall discussion that bluetooth keyboards also required libraries in
> /usr.
> 
> Right now it takes less common situations to trigger problems with a
> separate /usr, but the general trend is not favorable.  It isn't just
> software changes either - if I told somebody 15 years ago that USB
> keyboards were going to be problematic but standard PS2 keyboards
> would always work just fine, they'd say there was nothing to worry
> about since PS2 keyboards would always be around.  For all we know in
> 5 years you won't be able to buy a USB keyboard.
> 
> So, udev has been pushing things along to some extent, but the problem
> is definitely bigger than udev.

I'm glad someone else on this list finally realizes that udev did not break
separate /usr on its own. I've been trying to explain this to people
here for ages.

It isn't just programs that use libraries in /usr/lib that are broken.
Any program in early boot that tries to access data files in /usr/share
before /usr is mounted is broken, so for example, locales do not
work before /usr is mounted.

William


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 9:59 AM, William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I'm glad someone else on this list finally realizes that udev did not break
> separate /usr on its own. I've been trying to explain this to people
> here for ages.
>
> It isn't just programs that use libraries in /usr/lib that are broken.
> Any program in early boot that tries to access data files in /usr/share
> before /usr is mounted is broken, so for example, locales do not
> work before /usr is mounted.

Yup - the increasing dbusification and increased use of shared libs
has tended to drive this as well.  More and more system packages are
supporting more and more exotic and automagic configurations, and that
is leading to a situation where the boot-time dependencies are
growing.  The more complex your situation gets, the more likely you
need /usr early.

I bit the bullet with initramfs, and while I struggled with the dracut
documentation at the time it has worked out well.  I can just set up
an additional early-boot fstab and whatever is in it gets mounted.
I'll likely migrate root to lvm was well now that the barrier for that
is gone.  Plus, when I get new hardware I can just compile a boatload
of modules without getting memory bloat or trying to guess which
driver is the one needed to boot my new whatever.  It does cost some
compile time though.

But, if your needs are simple and you want to avoid the initramfs,
more power to you.  Gentoo is about choice.  It is OK to try something
and decide it isn't right, and that goes both ways.  I'd strongly
encourage everybody following this thread to understand your options,
try out your options (VMs or whatever), and make the decision because
you know what is best for you.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Samuli Suominen]

On 19/11/12 16:59, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 09:39:59AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:38 PM, Joshua Kinard <kumba@gentoo.org> wrote:
>>> Correct me if wrong, but didn't the issue start with udev wanting to put the
>>> PCI ID database/file into /usr/share from /etc?
>>
>> Well, I can't vouch for what the first issue that arose was, but I do
>> recall discussion that bluetooth keyboards also required libraries in
>> /usr.
>>
>> Right now it takes less common situations to trigger problems with a
>> separate /usr, but the general trend is not favorable.  It isn't just
>> software changes either - if I told somebody 15 years ago that USB
>> keyboards were going to be problematic but standard PS2 keyboards
>> would always work just fine, they'd say there was nothing to worry
>> about since PS2 keyboards would always be around.  For all we know in
>> 5 years you won't be able to buy a USB keyboard.
>>
>> So, udev has been pushing things along to some extent, but the problem
>> is definitely bigger than udev.
>
> I'm glad someone else on this list finally realizes that udev did not break
> separate /usr on its own. I've been trying to explain this to people
> here for ages.
>
> It isn't just programs that use libraries in /usr/lib that are broken.
> Any program in early boot that tries to access data files in /usr/share
> before /usr is mounted is broken, so for example, locales do not
> work before /usr is mounted.

Indeed.

I've opened a bug[1] for sys-apps/portage to gain QA check for cross / 
vs. /usr linking because the situation is out of control.

Help is required for writing the patch for the bug (!!!)

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=443590

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Joshua Kinard]

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On 11/19/2012 9:39 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:38 PM, Joshua Kinard <kumba@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> Correct me if wrong, but didn't the issue start with udev wanting to put the
>> PCI ID database/file into /usr/share from /etc?
> 
> Well, I can't vouch for what the first issue that arose was, but I do
> recall discussion that bluetooth keyboards also required libraries in
> /usr.
> 
> Right now it takes less common situations to trigger problems with a
> separate /usr, but the general trend is not favorable.  It isn't just
> software changes either - if I told somebody 15 years ago that USB
> keyboards were going to be problematic but standard PS2 keyboards
> would always work just fine, they'd say there was nothing to worry
> about since PS2 keyboards would always be around.  For all we know in
> 5 years you won't be able to buy a USB keyboard.

Trust me, there will always be a wired keyboard around.  Maybe it won't be
PS/2 and maybe it won't be USB, but there will always exist an option to
take a relatively "dumb" keyboard and plug it into the back of a computer to
have a basic input device for the foreseeable future.

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@gentoo.org
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Walter Dnes]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 07:06:04PM -0800, Greg KH wrote

> Again, udev isn't the problem here.  It hasn't broken the standalone
> /usr issue at all.

  systemd-udev supporters have an "interesting" definition of broken.
"I plead not guilty to vandalism your honour.  The complainant's window
has actually been broken for several years.  The stone I threw through
it merely pointed out the existing brokeness."

> There isn't anything in udev to change for this.  I don't understand
> why you are thinking that udev has anything to do with this issue
> at all.

  Before version 181, udev booted with a separate /usr.  As of 181, it
doesn't.  If anything, I would argue that udev 181 was deliberately
broken.  The fact is, udev made new - and insane - rules that are simply
*invalid*.  Modern udev is broken, and needs to be fixed.

> It's other packages that are the problem here.

  You mean like systemd?  When udev got rolled into the systemd tarball,
and started sharing code with systemd, it also inherited its
restrictions and separate-/usr-brokeness.

  And yes, I'm aware of "bluetooth keyboard drivers".  As I said in my
previous message, there have always been a few edge cases that require a
pre-mounted /usr to boot properly.  What I'm complaining about is that
the other 99% of udev users are now gratuitously forced to share the
pain of the edge case users.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
We are apparently better off trying to avoid udev like the plague.
Linus Torvalds; 2012/10/03 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/349

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:30:58AM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 07:06:04PM -0800, Greg KH wrote
> > There isn't anything in udev to change for this.  I don't understand
> > why you are thinking that udev has anything to do with this issue
> > at all.
> 
>   Before version 181, udev booted with a separate /usr.  As of 181, it
> doesn't.  If anything, I would argue that udev 181 was deliberately
> broken.  The fact is, udev made new - and insane - rules that are simply
> *invalid*.  Modern udev is broken, and needs to be fixed.

Is that because the 181 package moved files to /usr/ which is under the
control of the Gentoo packager, or because the source release of 181
upstream changed something?

I can't see anything in the 181 source release to cause this to happen,
care to point out the offending commits to me, as I must be missing
soemthing.

> > It's other packages that are the problem here.
> 
>   You mean like systemd?  When udev got rolled into the systemd tarball,
> and started sharing code with systemd, it also inherited its
> restrictions and separate-/usr-brokeness.

Again, any specific pointer to a commit in the tree that caused this?

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[William Hubbs]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 992 bytes --]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 09:08:52AM -0800, Greg KH wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:30:58AM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 07:06:04PM -0800, Greg KH wrote
> > > There isn't anything in udev to change for this.  I don't understand
> > > why you are thinking that udev has anything to do with this issue
> > > at all.
> > 
> >   Before version 181, udev booted with a separate /usr.  As of 181, it
> > doesn't.  If anything, I would argue that udev 181 was deliberately
> > broken.  The fact is, udev made new - and insane - rules that are simply
> > *invalid*.  Modern udev is broken, and needs to be fixed.
> 
> Is that because the 181 package moved files to /usr/ which is under the
> control of the Gentoo packager, or because the source release of 181
> upstream changed something?

As the packager of modern udev, if I have done something that upstream
does not support, I will fix it asap, just let me know what it was.

Thanks,

William


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Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Walter Dnes]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 09:08:52AM -0800, Greg KH wrote

> Again, any specific pointer to a commit in the tree that caused this?

  See http://wiki.gentoo.org/index.php?title=Udev/upgrade&redirect=no
Comments?

> Since this version udev depends on files in /usr. If you have /usr
> on a separate partition, you must boot your system with an initramfs
> which pre-mounts /usr.

  I understand that one option being considered is patching the build to
not depend on files in /usr.  Showing my age here, I remember when IBM
patched Windows 3.1 on-the-fly, to make it a DPMI client of OS/2.  MS
released Windows 3.11, which vas very slightly different, and the patch
broke.  IBM had to rush out a new patch.

  Given how cavalierly Kay & Lennart broke firmware driver loading, I
would not envy the Gentoo ebuild maintainer trying to keep udev
compatable with a separate /usr, especially given Lennart's
pronouncement about standalone udev being "a dead end".  The maintainer
will face a task similar in principle to what IBM was doing.  What
Richard Yao is doing is the udev equivalant of "jump off before you get
pushed off".

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
We are apparently better off trying to avoid udev like the plague.
Linus Torvalds; 2012/10/03 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/349

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 08:08:38PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 09:08:52AM -0800, Greg KH wrote
> 
> > Again, any specific pointer to a commit in the tree that caused this?
> 
>   See http://wiki.gentoo.org/index.php?title=Udev/upgrade&redirect=no
> Comments?

As I don't know who made those wiki changes, I don't know, but this
seems to be a choice made by the gentoo udev maintainers, not
necessarily the upstream developer's choice.

Do you see any problems when running udev in such a situation that
points at being a udev package, or udev upstream problem?

> > Since this version udev depends on files in /usr. If you have /usr
> > on a separate partition, you must boot your system with an initramfs
> > which pre-mounts /usr.
> 
>   I understand that one option being considered is patching the build to
> not depend on files in /usr.  Showing my age here, I remember when IBM
> patched Windows 3.1 on-the-fly, to make it a DPMI client of OS/2.  MS
> released Windows 3.11, which vas very slightly different, and the patch
> broke.  IBM had to rush out a new patch.

Binary patching is worlds different from source/build script patching.
Those of us who have been doing this for a while can handle source
patching quite easily.

>   Given how cavalierly Kay & Lennart broke firmware driver loading,

Wait, no, first off, Lennart had nothing to do with this, and secondly,
it was a kernel change that caused this to happen.  Thirdly, it's fixed
now, see my previous comments about this.

Oh, also, did this affect your systems?  Again, it was only for one type
of device that was not used by a lot of people.

That dead horse is long gone, please stop flogging it.

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Michael Mol]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 08:08:38PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 09:08:52AM -0800, Greg KH wrote
>>
>> > Again, any specific pointer to a commit in the tree that caused this?
>>
>>   See http://wiki.gentoo.org/index.php?title=Udev/upgrade&redirect=no
>> Comments?
>
> As I don't know who made those wiki changes, I don't know, but this
> seems to be a choice made by the gentoo udev maintainers, not
> necessarily the upstream developer's choice.

http://wiki.gentoo.org/index.php?title=Udev/upgrade&action=history
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Astaecker

Best ask him, I suppose.

--
:wq

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Markos Chandras]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 08:08:38PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
>>> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 09:08:52AM -0800, Greg KH wrote
>>>
>>> > Again, any specific pointer to a commit in the tree that caused this?
>>>
>>>   See http://wiki.gentoo.org/index.php?title=Udev/upgrade&redirect=no
>>> Comments?
>>
>> As I don't know who made those wiki changes, I don't know, but this
>> seems to be a choice made by the gentoo udev maintainers, not
>> necessarily the upstream developer's choice.
>
> http://wiki.gentoo.org/index.php?title=Udev/upgrade&action=history
> http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Astaecker
>
> Best ask him, I suppose.
>
> --
> :wq
>

This drives the whole discussion off-topic so lets just stop here.

-- 
Regards,
Markos Chandras / Gentoo Linux Developer / Key ID: B4AFF2C2

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Walter Dnes]

  I jumped off udev before I was pushed off...
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Mdev/Automount_USB

  While the Gentoo council meeting was looking at patches to udev on an
ongoing basis, I was planning for a worst-case scenario where a separate
/usr without initramfs is deprecated.  Maybe not tomorrow or next month,
but somewhere down the road.

  The only thing that will get me back onto udev is a separate fork,
like Richard Yao's, where I don't have to worry about Lennart Poettering
ramming his ideas into it.  Lennart Poettering was very clear about
standalone udev being "a dead end".  As for your statement that he isn't
involved in udev, please read his post
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-August/006066.html
where I've highlighted some words...

> Well, ***WE*** intent to continue to make it possible to run udevd
> outside of systemd. But that's about it.  ***WE*** will not polish
> that, or add new features to that or anything.
> 
> OTOH ***WE*** do polish behaviour of udev when used *within* systemd
> however, and that's ***OUR*** primary focus.
> 
> And what ***WE*** will certainly not do is compromise the uniform
> integration into systemd for some cosmetic improvements for
> non-systemd systems.
> 
> (Yes, udev on non-systemd systems is in ***OUR*** eyes a dead end,
> in case you haven't noticed it yet. I am looking forward to the day
> when ***WE*** can drop that support entirely.)

  If you think the statement that Lennart is at least unofficially
involved in udev is **** don't complain to me, complain to Lennart.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
We are apparently better off trying to avoid udev like the plague.
Linus Torvalds; 2012/10/03 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/3/349

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> I understand the bizarre need of some people to want to build the udev
> binary without the build-time dependencies that systemd requires, but
> surely that is a set of simple Makefile patches, right?  And is
> something that small really worth ripping tons of code out of a working
> udev, causing major regressions on people's boxes (and yes, it is a
> regression to slow my boot time down and cause hundreds of more
> processes to be spawned before booting is finished.)
>
> As I posted elsewhere, working on a project based on "hate" only lasts
> so long.  I should know, that's the reason I started udev in the first
> place over 9 years ago[1].
>
> [1] Long story, best told over beers, take me up on it the next time you
>     see me, I'll buy.

Not everybody can have a chance to have a beer with you. Would you
mind spending maybe an hour to write it down and share it with
everybody?
-- 
Duy

Re: [gentoo-dev] udev-ng? (Was: Summary Council meeting Tuesday 13 November 2012)

[Rich Freeman]

Wow, that's some kind of thread you started...  :)  I'll respond in
general to a bunch of stuff on this list by topic.


COUNCIL MEETING

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 10:29 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> So, that's a nice summary, but, what is the end result here?
>

Speaking as somebody who was there, but not for the council, the
summary was the end result OF THE COUNCIL MEETING.

The council was asked to set a deadline for everybody with a separate
/usr to adopt one of the proposed mitigation solutions, like using a
script, initramfs, or whatever.  That is ALL that it was asked to
decide on, and that was all it did decide on.  The whole business
about some devs wanting to fork udev came out about a day in advance,
and speaking personally it only had a little influence on my vote.

The reason I agree with chainsaw's proposal to defer the decision one
month was that there seemed to be enough blockers on this that nothing
was going to happen for almost another month anyway (best-case), and
getting people to move to initramfs or mdev or
[nu/eu]dev[-ng]/whatever wasn't actually going to be holding anything
up for a while.  I'd also have been willing to approve a plan to set a
target for something like 90 days after all the necessary tools (like
genkernel) were stable and news was sent out.  Based on my questions
for williamh I did not get the sense that delaying a month was
actually hindering the udev project (the established udev).  They were
encouraged to continue working on their blockers, preparing news
items, and so on - everything but having a deadline/go-ahead to break
systems that didn't follow the news.

So, a bunch of ideas were floating around in the meeting, and I
embraced the wait a month option since that seemed to have the most
support of any of the options out there.  If williamh had identified
some actual impact of delay on the udev team I'd have probably pushed
for setting the deadline now, but just putting it far enough out there
(90 days from genkernel/etc being ready) that all the various teams
would have a shot at it.  If the udev team gets their news items all
worked out and perhaps even sent out (sans deadline) and all the
blockers cleared before the next meeting I'd be supportive of setting
the deadline around 60 days, but that would be just moral support
since I'm not on the council.


OFFICIAL UDEV PROJECT

I have nothing to do with the new udev project, but I did pass the
staff quiz with much help from calchan.  :)

Read the GLEPs - any Gentoo developer can start a project at any time.
 That's how things work around here.  If I wanted to start a linux
kernel fork as an official Gentoo project I could do so tomorrow.

That doesn't mean that the new udev will become the default udev, any
more than Gentoo hardened will ever become the default experience for
new Gentoo users.  Gentoo is about choice, and if we have devs
interested in maintaining something new then we'll offer that choice
to our users for as long as somebody takes care of it.

If anybody wants to change the defaults/etc, I'd expect that to get a
lot of discussion, and almost certainly a council vote.


COPYRIGHT

I think this issue is best dealt with on the side - it has no bearing
on any of the really contentious points here.

I note that the owners of the copyright on udev have announced to the
world that (emphasis mine):
You may modify your copy or copies of the Library or ANY PORTION OF
IT, thus forming a work based on the Library, and copy and distribute
such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above,
provided that you also meet all of these conditions...

None of those conditions included keeping the copyright line intact.

Anybody can therefore alter the copyright line as they wish, as they
have been given explicit permission to do so.  They need only comply
with the other terms in the LGPL to do so (the most important being
licensing it under the LGPL and making the source available.

In fact, (L)GPL v3 has an optional attribution clause, and the fact
that they made this explicit is because some projects might not want
to give out this authorization.

So, if you want an official ruling from the trustees we would need to
meet/vote on it and perhaps discuss with counsel, but my thinking is
that anybody distributing work under the (L)GPL has waived their right
to be named on the copyright line of any copies distributed by others,
and as far as I can tell I have found nothing to the contrary from any
authoritative source.  The only way I think you could argue that
removing copyright notices for a (L)GPL work is illegal is if you
argue that an author doesn't have the legal power to license that
right to another.  However, I'd still think that promissory estoppel
would probably interfere with any kind of recourse - you can't give
somebody permission to do something, and then sue them for actually
doing it.  So, legal or not anybody with standing to sue over this has
likely given up their rights to do so.

Again, that's my two cents and not a license for anybody to do
anything.  This topic did come up recently with regard to accepting
some other kind of outside work into Gentoo, and as I recall there was
some debate over whether the copyright notices could be changed.  I'd
have to dig up the details - I think the issue might have been mooted
before any kind of formal decision was reached...


IS THE NEW UDEV A GOOD/BAD/UGLY IDEA

Seems like this is the main point of this whole thread, and I don't
find it terribly useful to harp on.  If people want to start a udev
fork more power to them.  I'm supportive of that, just as I'm
supportive of having systemd in the tree and unit files for as many
packages as possible.  As projects mature I'd be all for offering them
as options in the handbook.  Gentoo is about choice.

Ditto for a /usr move or whatever else.  I think we should have a
reasonable default behavior, and as others have pointed out we could
use profiles to control a bunch of these behaviors globally (like
library install location, and so on).  Again, offer the user the
choice, and generally be conservative with the defaults.

Will all these projects go the distance?  Hard to say.  I agree that
projects inspired by "hate" or whatever often fizzle out, but several
high profile forks have stuck around - usually because of conflict
over the major goals of the project.  The next few years should be
interesting, as the amount of vertical integration seems to be
creeping up, and if a major Gnome release is systemd-only or whatever
that could really bring things to a head.  This almost seems like an
androidification of the traditional linux distro - where choice still
exists but the ability to swap out layers starts to go away unless you
stick with a lighter desktop environment.  Should make things fun for
the toolkit developers when a system might or might not have
dbus/systemd/udev/X11/wayland/linux/bsd and who knows what else.


Rich

[gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 07:06:50AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> COPYRIGHT
> 
> I think this issue is best dealt with on the side - it has no bearing
> on any of the really contentious points here.
> 
> I note that the owners of the copyright on udev have announced to the
> world that (emphasis mine):
> You may modify your copy or copies of the Library or ANY PORTION OF
> IT, thus forming a work based on the Library, and copy and distribute
> such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above,
> provided that you also meet all of these conditions...
> 
> None of those conditions included keeping the copyright line intact.

True, but removing a copyright line doesn't change the real copyright of
a file, although it is generally considered something that you really
should not do at all (see your local copyright laws/rules for details.)

> Anybody can therefore alter the copyright line as they wish, as they
> have been given explicit permission to do so.  They need only comply
> with the other terms in the LGPL to do so (the most important being
> licensing it under the LGPL and making the source available.

Heh, wait, no, you can not do that.  You can not modify a copyright line
to add your own, without first doing one of the two things I discussed
in the beginning.  Otherwise, don't you think that all of those big
companies that are using Linux and other open source projects would have
done something like this already?

> In fact, (L)GPL v3 has an optional attribution clause, and the fact
> that they made this explicit is because some projects might not want
> to give out this authorization.

Changing the lines in the comment block in the code files is not what
attribution clauses are about at all.

I could go into details about copyright, and how it works, and how you
need to treat it if you are a programmer, but I'm not a lawyer, and the
rules are different in different countries and even states.

I have, however, worked with a very large number of lawyers, and
companies, and have the basics down, and none of what you say above is
really allowed at all, sorry.

Also note, if you just remove code from a file, you don't get copyright
of the file, which is a fun thing to think about if you are trying to
remove features from a product, or doing 'git revert' of specific
patchsets.

> So, if you want an official ruling from the trustees we would need to
> meet/vote on it and perhaps discuss with counsel, but my thinking is
> that anybody distributing work under the (L)GPL has waived their right
> to be named on the copyright line of any copies distributed by others,

Again, no, this is flat out not right.  Please discuss with counsel if
you disagree and they can go into the details.

> and as far as I can tell I have found nothing to the contrary from any
> authoritative source.

Talk to a copyright lawyer please.  I'm sure there is one that the
Foundation uses, right?

> Again, that's my two cents and not a license for anybody to do
> anything.  This topic did come up recently with regard to accepting
> some other kind of outside work into Gentoo, and as I recall there was
> some debate over whether the copyright notices could be changed.  I'd
> have to dig up the details - I think the issue might have been mooted
> before any kind of formal decision was reached...

I think this is something that the Foundation's counsel better get set
up properly, as it really is a big deal, and can come back to cause big
problems if done wrong.  I say this as someone who has been part of
lawsuits dealing with this type of thing, and as someone who has worked
with lawyers on copyright issues for open source projects for a very
long time[1].

But as always, talk to a lawyer, I suggest that the Foundation do this
to set up the proper guidelines and rules that all Gentoo developers
need to follow.  That will clear all of this confusion up properly.

thanks,

greg k-h

[1] I've worked with them so much, that I'm a "continuing education"
    credit for lawyers in the USA when I give one of my various talks
    about how open source projects are developed, and how the copyright
    and license issues work within them.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> True, but removing a copyright line doesn't change the real copyright of
> a file, although it is generally considered something that you really
> should not do at all (see your local copyright laws/rules for details.)

Agreed that removing the line does not change the actual copyright of
the file, well, aside from anything new you stick on that line.

I'm not convinced that it is something you can't do if you're
explicitly given permission to do so by the copyright holder.

> Again, no, this is flat out not right.  Please discuss with counsel if
> you disagree and they can go into the details.

Well, certainly something worth doing in any case.

I think any answer given by anybody is going to be speculative, as
doubt that any court has ruled on whether removing names from a
copyright line licensed under the GPL is illegal.  There are fairly
few rulings of any kind concerning the GPL.  Copyright just wasn't
really written with copyleft in mind.

I suspect, as a result, that most lawyers would basically listen to my
argument and say "well, sure, you can argue that, and a judge might or
might not buy it, but do you really want to be sued over this to find
out?"  That's the issue with the law in most jurisdictions - the only
way you can truly find out if something is illegal is for somebody to
try it and go to court.  After all, who would have thought that you
could patent round corners?

Suppose I send you a program that I've copyrighted.  It has a line on
it saying "Copyright 2012 - Richard Freeman - see accompanying license
file." on it.  I tell you that I don't mind if you remove the
copyright line.  Can you remove it?  Now, suppose instead I tell you
that you can make any change you want in the file - can you remove it
now?  Now suppose I tell you that you can make any change in the file
that you want, as long as the copyright line says "see accompanying
license file" and that file is intact.  Can you remove the name?

That's the issue here - the copyright owner has given me a license to
do various things, including modify the file, and the file contains
the copyright line.  So, what normally would be illegal may in fact be
legal after all.  But, the only way to really be sure is to try it and
get sued.  And if you want to know how the law works in every country,
you'd need to be sued in every country.

Certainly interested in arguments to the contrary.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:29:35PM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > True, but removing a copyright line doesn't change the real copyright of
> > a file, although it is generally considered something that you really
> > should not do at all (see your local copyright laws/rules for details.)
> 
> Agreed that removing the line does not change the actual copyright of
> the file, well, aside from anything new you stick on that line.
> 
> I'm not convinced that it is something you can't do if you're
> explicitly given permission to do so by the copyright holder.

Talk to a lawyer if you disagree with this.  The area of copyright law,
and software, is very well defined (with one exception of the "major
change to add your copyright, and even then, there's an agreed apon
standard to follow).  Because of that, I disagree that you think this is
something that is unknown at all.

But I'm not going to be able to change your mind :)  Please get the
Foundation to write up the rules apon which Gentoo developers need to
handle the copyright mark, so that there's no disagreement as to what to
do, in any type of situation.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:30 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> Talk to a lawyer if you disagree with this.  The area of copyright law,
> and software, is very well defined (with one exception of the "major
> change to add your copyright, and even then, there's an agreed apon
> standard to follow).  Because of that, I disagree that you think this is
> something that is unknown at all.

I realize that it is illegal to remove a copyright line from a work
without permission, just as it is illegal to copy a work in the first
place without permission.  The question is whether the GPL gives such
permission, whether it is possible to give such permission, or at
least whether you can give somebody this permission and then sue them
for following through.

That's my main concern here.  Can somebody say, "sure, go ahead and
remove my name from the copyright line" and then sue you for doing it?

>
> But I'm not going to be able to change your mind :)  Please get the
> Foundation to write up the rules apon which Gentoo developers need to
> handle the copyright mark, so that there's no disagreement as to what to
> do, in any type of situation.

I'm not curious enough that I'd be willing to spend money on this.  If
somebody wants to change my mind they're welcome to provide me with a
reference for a relevant case.  I'm sure there are endless cases of
bad things happening to people removing copyright lines, just as there
are endless cases of people being sued for copying files.  I'm
concerned with cases where something bad has happened to somebody who
removed a copyright line after being given permission to do so, and
cases dealing with copyleft licenses and whether they grant this
permission.

I suspect the wisest course of action for the Foundation will be to
take the conservative approach.  However, I do not believe that this
is because this is legally required.  It is simply a matter of not
being wise to spend all that donated money fighting to prove that this
is the case.  After all, even if I'm completely right, that doesn't
mean that somebody can't sue me.  Winning a legal case in the US is a
very expensive proposition.  I'm sure that would be the advice of any
lawyer we retained.  All that said, a formal policy would be a good
idea.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 07:03:12AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:30 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >
> > Talk to a lawyer if you disagree with this.  The area of copyright law,
> > and software, is very well defined (with one exception of the "major
> > change to add your copyright, and even then, there's an agreed apon
> > standard to follow).  Because of that, I disagree that you think this is
> > something that is unknown at all.
> 
> I realize that it is illegal to remove a copyright line from a work
> without permission, just as it is illegal to copy a work in the first
> place without permission.  The question is whether the GPL gives such
> permission, whether it is possible to give such permission, or at
> least whether you can give somebody this permission and then sue them
> for following through.
> 
> That's my main concern here.  Can somebody say, "sure, go ahead and
> remove my name from the copyright line" and then sue you for doing it?

Just removing the name doesn't remove the copyright itself, but, and
this is the important thing, it shows "intent".  Intent is a very
powerful thing when it comes to legal enforcement.  If you remove a
copyright line, or add your own line, you are showing what you are
wanting to do here.

So if you remove a copyright line, you are showing your "intent" to
remove the legal notification of the original copyright holders of the
file, which, in numerous juristictions, can be a very serious offence.

Again, talk to a lawyer for all of the details if you are curious.

> I suspect the wisest course of action for the Foundation will be to
> take the conservative approach.  However, I do not believe that this
> is because this is legally required.  It is simply a matter of not
> being wise to spend all that donated money fighting to prove that this
> is the case.  After all, even if I'm completely right, that doesn't
> mean that somebody can't sue me.  Winning a legal case in the US is a
> very expensive proposition.  I'm sure that would be the advice of any
> lawyer we retained.  All that said, a formal policy would be a good
> idea.

No one has to "fight" at all here, the law is very clear, and a quick
consultation with a copyright lawyer can provide us with a very good set
of rules and boundry conditions that all of us need to follow in order
to ensure that the Foundation does not get into any trouble when it
comes to copyrights.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Peter Stuge]

Greg KH wrote:
> this isn't obvious at first glance, go consult a copyright lawyer
> for the specific details if you are curious about it.
> 
> Which, again, I strongly feel that the Foundation needs to do

+1


> before anymore "Copyright Gentoo Foundation" marks get added to
> _any_ files in our tree.

I always did wonder about how that works in ebuilds. I assumed that
part of being a developer included assignment for any ebuilds to be
committed. Of course that isn't true for what I have in my overlay.


//Peter

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 07:03:12AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> That's my main concern here.  Can somebody say, "sure, go ahead and
>> remove my name from the copyright line" and then sue you for doing it?
>
> Just removing the name doesn't remove the copyright itself, but, and
> this is the important thing, it shows "intent".  Intent is a very
> powerful thing when it comes to legal enforcement.  If you remove a
> copyright line, or add your own line, you are showing what you are
> wanting to do here.
>
> So if you remove a copyright line, you are showing your "intent" to
> remove the legal notification of the original copyright holders of the
> file, which, in numerous juristictions, can be a very serious offence.
>
> Again, talk to a lawyer for all of the details if you are curious.

So, I give you a file.  Then I tell you IN WRITING that you can go
ahead and remove my name from the copyright line if you want to.

I think it would be hard for me to argue that I should be able to
obtain damages when I gave you authorization to remove my name.

I think the general intent is not to pretend that others did not
contribute to the work before, but rather to avoid cluttering the file
with a laundry list of names.

That said, I'd be happy to chat with a lawyer about this, and if you
know of any who wouldn't mind having such a conversation free of
charge, let me know, or feel free to point them to the list.

> No one has to "fight" at all here, the law is very clear, and a quick
> consultation with a copyright lawyer can provide us with a very good set
> of rules and boundry conditions that all of us need to follow in order
> to ensure that the Foundation does not get into any trouble when it
> comes to copyrights.

The only way to avoid trouble when it comes to copyright is to never
copy anything, or link to anything, and make sure that anybody else
using your internet connection does the same.

Everything after that is just an exercise in risk mitigation.  I don't
think there is any basis in law for getting in trouble for removing
names from copyrights for GPL works.  That said, there doesn't need to
be a basis in law for being sued, or even for losing a lawsuit.  So,
if I had to vote on this as a trustee I'd likely take the conservative
approach.  However, I'll reserve my right to whine about the problems
with the legal system all the same.  :)

From my general interactions with lawyers in the US they're very
pragmatic.  They aren't about "right and wrong" but rather what you
can and can't get away with.  It really doesn't matter if I'm
completely right and you're completely wrong, if in order for me to
exercise my rights I have to spend $100k fighting in courts, and
perhaps even losing in the process.  In the US, your rights are
whatever you can afford for them to be.

On the topic of risk mitigation - it is all about what you get vs what
you could lose.  Honestly I don't see much reason for removing people
from copyright lines other than for the sake of decluttering.  That
being the case, the wisest move might be to just add the Foundation to
copyright statements and leave the rest alone.  For ebuilds I'd
probably keep the headers in accordance with the standard format, and
just move any existing copyright statements further down in the file.
If clutter gets really bad we should consider whether we can just move
excessive copyright statements to the end of the file, perhaps with a
reference at the top next to a single line copyright statement
(Copyright 2012 Gentoo Foundation, et al - Licensed under... - see end
of file for further details).

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

On 19/11/2012 10:06, Rich Freeman wrote:
> So, I give you a file.  Then I tell you IN WRITING that you can go
> ahead and remove my name from the copyright line if you want to.
> 
> I think it would be hard for me to argue that I should be able to
> obtain damages when I gave you authorization to remove my name.

You're trying to navigate extremely difficult and varying waters.

Remember that under most European copyright laws (under "author's
rights", which includes Germany, France and Italy at the very least),
you can't even have "public domain", as long as you're alive.

Which is why things like WTFPL came up to be.

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/19/2012 01:16 PM, Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> On 19/11/2012 10:06, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> So, I give you a file.  Then I tell you IN WRITING that you can go
>> ahead and remove my name from the copyright line if you want to.
>>
>> I think it would be hard for me to argue that I should be able to
>> obtain damages when I gave you authorization to remove my name.
> 
> You're trying to navigate extremely difficult and varying waters.
> 
> Remember that under most European copyright laws (under "author's
> rights", which includes Germany, France and Italy at the very least),
> you can't even have "public domain", as long as you're alive.
> 
> Which is why things like WTFPL came up to be.
> 

One of the functions of the foundation exists to handle legal matters.
Is there anything that prevents the foundation from claiming ownership
over work done on Gentoo Infrastructure in the same sense that a
corporation would for its employees?

Alternatively, do people working for companies in Europe retain
copyright over everything that they did while employed?


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

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On 19/11/2012 14:45, Richard Yao wrote:
> Is there anything that prevents the foundation from claiming ownership
> over work done on Gentoo Infrastructure in the same sense that a
> corporation would for its employees?

Lots.

> Alternatively, do people working for companies in Europe retain
> copyright over everything that they did while employed?

During their spare time, yes, as far as I can tell (but obviously I'm
not a lawyer). Usually that matter is settled with the employment
contract you sign (or otherwise with a specific agreement for
contractual work). As far as I can tell in neither case you're losing
your "author's rights", but you're giving the company the ability to do
what they want with the code.

Again, this should be handled through the Foundation, so ask the
Trustees or if you don't want to, ask FSFe or SFLC.

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Richard Yao <ryao@gentoo.org> wrote:
> One of the functions of the foundation exists to handle legal matters.
> Is there anything that prevents the foundation from claiming ownership
> over work done on Gentoo Infrastructure in the same sense that a
> corporation would for its employees?

The fact that Gentoo developers aren't employees would be a big
problem with that.  This isn't work for hire, and maintaining this
highly productive email list probably isn't compensation enough to
qualify.

The only way Gentoo can hold copyright is if individuals donate the
rights to their work.  And, as has been pointed out, even that gets
tricky in some jurisdictions.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 01:06:17PM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 07:03:12AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> >> That's my main concern here.  Can somebody say, "sure, go ahead and
> >> remove my name from the copyright line" and then sue you for doing it?
> >
> > Just removing the name doesn't remove the copyright itself, but, and
> > this is the important thing, it shows "intent".  Intent is a very
> > powerful thing when it comes to legal enforcement.  If you remove a
> > copyright line, or add your own line, you are showing what you are
> > wanting to do here.
> >
> > So if you remove a copyright line, you are showing your "intent" to
> > remove the legal notification of the original copyright holders of the
> > file, which, in numerous juristictions, can be a very serious offence.
> >
> > Again, talk to a lawyer for all of the details if you are curious.
> 
> So, I give you a file.  Then I tell you IN WRITING that you can go
> ahead and remove my name from the copyright line if you want to.
> 
> I think it would be hard for me to argue that I should be able to
> obtain damages when I gave you authorization to remove my name.

You obviously are trying to apply "logic" to laws.  That can not always
be done, sorry, you should know better :)

Again, if you want details, talk to a copyright lawyer.

You aren't taking my word for it, so I'm not going to try to argue the
point any further.

> That said, I'd be happy to chat with a lawyer about this, and if you
> know of any who wouldn't mind having such a conversation free of
> charge, let me know, or feel free to point them to the list.

Lawyers that work free-of-charge are rare, but the SFLC has some that
might be able to help out.

Again, the Foundation should be doing this, and set up the proper
guidelines/rules that we all follow, and then these discussions will not
need to happen.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:06:53 -0800
Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> No one has to "fight" at all here, the law is very clear, and a quick
> consultation with a copyright lawyer can provide us with a very good
> set of rules and boundry conditions that all of us need to follow in
> order to ensure that the Foundation does not get into any trouble
> when it comes to copyrights.

The last time someone from Gentoo spoke to a copyright lawyer, it
resulted in a year-or-so-long ban on recruiting anyone, and everyone
was supposed to sign a piece of paper agreeing to turn over all their
floppy disks and monitors to drobbins upon request.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Peter Stuge]

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Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > a quick consultation with a copyright lawyer can provide us with
> > a very good set of rules and boundry conditions
> 
> The last time someone from Gentoo spoke to a copyright lawyer, it
> resulted in a year-or-so-long ban on recruiting anyone, and everyone
> was supposed to sign a piece of paper agreeing to turn over all their
> floppy disks and monitors to drobbins upon request.

There are obviously bad copyright lawyers for open source projects.

But there are also really good ones.


//Peter

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 1:23 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:
> The last time someone from Gentoo spoke to a copyright lawyer, it
> resulted in a year-or-so-long ban on recruiting anyone, and everyone
> was supposed to sign a piece of paper agreeing to turn over all their
> floppy disks and monitors to drobbins upon request.

Hence my comment on risk management.  The only way to be safe is to
not get anything done.  The same is true of avoiding kicking off
projects that tick people off - the only way to do that is to
effectively not have any more projects (after everybody gives up on
the process).

I'm sure Gentoo's risk balance can be improved, but the fact is that
in this day and age, writing software entails legal risk, just like
helping somebody cross the street.

If Gentoo were trying to monetize/dual-license/etc then the benefits
of airtight copyright assignments would be greater, as would be the
benefit of telling anybody in the EU that their help simply isn't
needed unless they can convince their parliaments to change their
laws.  As a community distro, however, we have a different set of
priorities.

I think the key is to understand the risk that we're taking, and the
benefits of changing things.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

On 19/11/2012 10:44, Rich Freeman wrote:
> If Gentoo were trying to monetize/dual-license/etc then the benefits
> of airtight copyright assignments would be greater, as would be the
> benefit of telling anybody in the EU that their help simply isn't
> needed unless they can convince their parliaments to change their
> laws.  As a community distro, however, we have a different set of
> priorities.

Sorry Rich, are you freaking kidding me? Europe would need to change
laws? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?

There's a very simple way to handle this and it doesn't require changing
laws that are perfectly fine for most people living in Europe, thank you
very much, and that's called a license agreement.

https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/fla.en.html

I'm afraid that now I have to just do a Greg and suggest that before you
speak further, you talk to a lawyer. SFLC would probably answer your
questions for free, if not try asking FSFe, I know they have a legal
counsel office.

Or do you think that Sun/Oracle and Google refuse to get people working
on their project from Europe?

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 1:50 PM, Diego Elio Pettenò
<flameeyes@flameeyes.eu> wrote:
> Sorry Rich, are you freaking kidding me? Europe would need to change
> laws? ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?
>
> There's a very simple way to handle this and it doesn't require changing
> laws that are perfectly fine for most people living in Europe, thank you
> very much, and that's called a license agreement.

Uh, I was joking.  Sorry if that was not apparent.  Turning away
Europeans or trying to change the laws is absurd.

And I'm sure that if any policies get changed, lawyers will be consulted.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 06:23:44PM +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:06:53 -0800
> Greg KH <gregkh@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > No one has to "fight" at all here, the law is very clear, and a quick
> > consultation with a copyright lawyer can provide us with a very good
> > set of rules and boundry conditions that all of us need to follow in
> > order to ensure that the Foundation does not get into any trouble
> > when it comes to copyrights.
> 
> The last time someone from Gentoo spoke to a copyright lawyer, it
> resulted in a year-or-so-long ban on recruiting anyone, and everyone
> was supposed to sign a piece of paper agreeing to turn over all their
> floppy disks and monitors to drobbins upon request.

Yes, that was due to me refusing to sign the old Gentoo copyright
assignment (well, actually, my employer at the time refused to sign it,
rightfully so.)  I thought we had that all worked out since then, as it
was, what, 8+ years ago?

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Richard Yao]

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On 11/18/2012 09:58 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 07:06:50AM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> COPYRIGHT
>>
>> I think this issue is best dealt with on the side - it has no bearing
>> on any of the really contentious points here.
>>
>> I note that the owners of the copyright on udev have announced to the
>> world that (emphasis mine):
>> You may modify your copy or copies of the Library or ANY PORTION OF
>> IT, thus forming a work based on the Library, and copy and distribute
>> such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above,
>> provided that you also meet all of these conditions...
>>
>> None of those conditions included keeping the copyright line intact.
> 
> True, but removing a copyright line doesn't change the real copyright of
> a file, although it is generally considered something that you really
> should not do at all (see your local copyright laws/rules for details.)
> 
>> Anybody can therefore alter the copyright line as they wish, as they
>> have been given explicit permission to do so.  They need only comply
>> with the other terms in the LGPL to do so (the most important being
>> licensing it under the LGPL and making the source available.
> 
> Heh, wait, no, you can not do that.  You can not modify a copyright line
> to add your own, without first doing one of the two things I discussed
> in the beginning.  Otherwise, don't you think that all of those big
> companies that are using Linux and other open source projects would have
> done something like this already?
> 
>> In fact, (L)GPL v3 has an optional attribution clause, and the fact
>> that they made this explicit is because some projects might not want
>> to give out this authorization.
> 
> Changing the lines in the comment block in the code files is not what
> attribution clauses are about at all.
> 
> I could go into details about copyright, and how it works, and how you
> need to treat it if you are a programmer, but I'm not a lawyer, and the
> rules are different in different countries and even states.
> 
> I have, however, worked with a very large number of lawyers, and
> companies, and have the basics down, and none of what you say above is
> really allowed at all, sorry.
> 
> Also note, if you just remove code from a file, you don't get copyright
> of the file, which is a fun thing to think about if you are trying to
> remove features from a product, or doing 'git revert' of specific
> patchsets.
> 
>> So, if you want an official ruling from the trustees we would need to
>> meet/vote on it and perhaps discuss with counsel, but my thinking is
>> that anybody distributing work under the (L)GPL has waived their right
>> to be named on the copyright line of any copies distributed by others,
> 
> Again, no, this is flat out not right.  Please discuss with counsel if
> you disagree and they can go into the details.
> 
>> and as far as I can tell I have found nothing to the contrary from any
>> authoritative source.
> 
> Talk to a copyright lawyer please.  I'm sure there is one that the
> Foundation uses, right?
> 
>> Again, that's my two cents and not a license for anybody to do
>> anything.  This topic did come up recently with regard to accepting
>> some other kind of outside work into Gentoo, and as I recall there was
>> some debate over whether the copyright notices could be changed.  I'd
>> have to dig up the details - I think the issue might have been mooted
>> before any kind of formal decision was reached...
> 
> I think this is something that the Foundation's counsel better get set
> up properly, as it really is a big deal, and can come back to cause big
> problems if done wrong.  I say this as someone who has been part of
> lawsuits dealing with this type of thing, and as someone who has worked
> with lawyers on copyright issues for open source projects for a very
> long time[1].
> 
> But as always, talk to a lawyer, I suggest that the Foundation do this
> to set up the proper guidelines and rules that all Gentoo developers
> need to follow.  That will clear all of this confusion up properly.
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h

We develop open source software in public repositories. A developer
decided it would be helpful to change the software name systemd to
eudev, among other things, in various files after misunderstanding what
the Foundation officers in charge of legal matters had approved. You
objected to it. I asked for clarification after seeing that your name
had not been removed from any copyright notices. You explained your
complaint. I asked you to wait for the person who wrote the commit to
fix it. It was fixed.

That is all that was necessary. Whining on the list did not wake the
author of that commit sooner. Furthermore, the changes that you wanted
would have been made in a few days had you not become involved.


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:05:05PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 11/18/2012 09:58 PM, Greg KH wrote:

<an on-topic discussion about copyright thread response from me snipped>

> We develop open source software in public repositories. A developer
> decided it would be helpful to change the software name systemd to
> eudev, among other things, in various files after misunderstanding what
> the Foundation officers in charge of legal matters had approved. You
> objected to it. I asked for clarification after seeing that your name
> had not been removed from any copyright notices. You explained your
> complaint. I asked you to wait for the person who wrote the commit to
> fix it. It was fixed.
> 
> That is all that was necessary. Whining on the list did not wake the
> author of that commit sooner. Furthermore, the changes that you wanted
> would have been made in a few days had you not become involved.

None of the words you wrote here seem to me to be related to my response
about copyright, the Gentoo Foundation, and how copyright works for
software projects at all.  So I'm a bit confused, what are you concerned
about here?

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Greg KH]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:21:20PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> On 11/18/2012 11:22 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:05:05PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
> >> On 11/18/2012 09:58 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> > 
> > <an on-topic discussion about copyright thread response from me snipped>
> > 
> >> We develop open source software in public repositories. A developer
> >> decided it would be helpful to change the software name systemd to
> >> eudev, among other things, in various files after misunderstanding what
> >> the Foundation officers in charge of legal matters had approved. You
> >> objected to it. I asked for clarification after seeing that your name
> >> had not been removed from any copyright notices. You explained your
> >> complaint. I asked you to wait for the person who wrote the commit to
> >> fix it. It was fixed.
> >>
> >> That is all that was necessary. Whining on the list did not wake the
> >> author of that commit sooner. Furthermore, the changes that you wanted
> >> would have been made in a few days had you not become involved.
> > 
> > None of the words you wrote here seem to me to be related to my response
> > about copyright, the Gentoo Foundation, and how copyright works for
> > software projects at all.  So I'm a bit confused, what are you concerned
> > about here?
> > 
> > greg k-h
> 
> Your issue has been resolved. You can stop beating the dead horse now.

I was responding to a discussion about how copyright works, and how it
should be marked as such for Gentoo-related projects, that was not
correct in my knowledge of copyright law.  It had nothing to do with "my
issue", or the udev issue at all, which is why I even changed the
subject.

Oh well.

*plonk*

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Anthony G. Basile]

On 11/18/2012 11:34 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:21:20PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>> On 11/18/2012 11:22 PM, Greg KH wrote:
>>> On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 11:05:05PM -0500, Richard Yao wrote:
>>>> On 11/18/2012 09:58 PM, Greg KH wrote:
>>>
>>> <an on-topic discussion about copyright thread response from me snipped>
>>>
>>>> We develop open source software in public repositories. A developer
>>>> decided it would be helpful to change the software name systemd to
>>>> eudev, among other things, in various files after misunderstanding what
>>>> the Foundation officers in charge of legal matters had approved. You
>>>> objected to it. I asked for clarification after seeing that your name
>>>> had not been removed from any copyright notices. You explained your
>>>> complaint. I asked you to wait for the person who wrote the commit to
>>>> fix it. It was fixed.
>>>>
>>>> That is all that was necessary. Whining on the list did not wake the
>>>> author of that commit sooner. Furthermore, the changes that you wanted
>>>> would have been made in a few days had you not become involved.
>>>
>>> None of the words you wrote here seem to me to be related to my response
>>> about copyright, the Gentoo Foundation, and how copyright works for
>>> software projects at all.  So I'm a bit confused, what are you concerned
>>> about here?
>>>
>>> greg k-h
>>
>> Your issue has been resolved. You can stop beating the dead horse now.
>
> I was responding to a discussion about how copyright works, and how it
> should be marked as such for Gentoo-related projects, that was not
> correct in my knowledge of copyright law.  It had nothing to do with "my
> issue", or the udev issue at all, which is why I even changed the
> subject.
>
> Oh well.
>
> *plonk*

Greg,

Thank you for these responses because they did help me understand 
copyright/left better.  I appreciate your expertise in the matter and 
would hope I can draw on it again in the future, because despite what 
you said a few emails ago, copyright/left is not something that every 
software developer understands.

My fundamental confusion was over the question of what is the smallest 
copyrightable unit.  I think in terms of blame/kudos and the unit that 
comes to mind is one commit, properly isolated.  When a project becomes 
serious, I get careful about the signoffs vs authors vs reporters etc. 
And "blame" is as much a part of the game as "kudos".

The other levels are files and projects.  So this leads to the other 
confusion, do you touch every file in the project when forking etc.

The answer appears to be that a file is the unit, but from practice I've 
seen all three.  What is correct is what passes in the courts and I do 
not want to, nor have I ever, tested that.  Thus working with copyright 
is fundamentally different than working with code because I can readily 
test one but not the other.  Since you only gain experience by doing 
something, I can confidently say I have zero copyright experience.

Again thanks.

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph. D.
Professor of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
(716) 829-8197

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Peter Stuge]

Anthony G. Basile wrote:
> The answer appears to be that a file is the unit

I personally consider it to be smaller; a number of lines within
a file, or even a single line, all depending on things.


//Peter

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:10 AM, Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se> wrote:
> Anthony G. Basile wrote:
>> The answer appears to be that a file is the unit
>
> I personally consider it to be smaller; a number of lines within
> a file, or even a single line, all depending on things.

Yup - any creative expression is copyrightable.  Your two line email
is completely copyrightable, and so is the one line you quoted.  That
said, Anthony couldn't have used copyright to prevent you and I from
quoting him, as it would almost certainly be considered fair use.
That doesn't mean that his email wasn't copyrightable - only that
copyright is not an impervious protection.

Rich

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Petteri Räty]

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On 19.11.2012 18.33, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:10 AM, Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se> wrote:
>> Anthony G. Basile wrote:
>>> The answer appears to be that a file is the unit
>>
>> I personally consider it to be smaller; a number of lines within
>> a file, or even a single line, all depending on things.
> 
> Yup - any creative expression is copyrightable.  Your two line email
> is completely copyrightable, and so is the one line you quoted.  That
> said, Anthony couldn't have used copyright to prevent you and I from
> quoting him, as it would almost certainly be considered fair use.
> That doesn't mean that his email wasn't copyrightable - only that
> copyright is not an impervious protection.
> 

Under Finnish law there's the concept threshold of originality and I
doubt you would get a court to accept a single line of email for that.
There's also a body creating precedent for it but I haven't investigated
their decisions. I tried googling but couldn't find a source for it but
I think FSF has also operated so that they haven't required copyright
assignment for single patches worth a couple lines. This is my memory
from talking to a GNU maintainer some years back.

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Greg KH]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 07:41:54AM -0500, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
> Thank you for these responses because they did help me understand
> copyright/left better.  I appreciate your expertise in the matter
> and would hope I can draw on it again in the future, because despite
> what you said a few emails ago, copyright/left is not something that
> every software developer understands.

I'm curious as to why this is?  Didn't you learn about this in school
(if you went to school for software development), or from any company
you have worked for?  At numerous companies I have worked for, it was
part of the "introduction to company FOO, here's your legal training on
what to do and not to do with regards to open source."  _ANY_ company
dealing with Linux should have this type of thing in place, otherwise,
as I have found out first hand, it can get you in big trouble.

> My fundamental confusion was over the question of what is the
> smallest copyrightable unit.  I think in terms of blame/kudos and
> the unit that comes to mind is one commit, properly isolated.  When
> a project becomes serious, I get careful about the signoffs vs
> authors vs reporters etc. And "blame" is as much a part of the game
> as "kudos".

Yes, an individual "unit" of contribution is copyrightable, but, and
this is the important part, it doesn't modify the overall copyright of
the whole file unless some other criteria is met (i.e. a "major" change
to the file overall, this has come to mean at least 1/3 of the
logic/code.)

And then there's the overall copyright for the whole program, which too
depends on the copyrights of the individual files, that is another thing
to determine.

Yes, this isn't obvious at first glance, go consult a copyright lawyer
for the specific details if you are curious about it.

Which, again, I strongly feel that the Foundation needs to do before
anymore "Copyright Gentoo Foundation" marks get added to _any_ files in
our tree.

thanks,

greg k-h

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

On 19/11/2012 09:02, Greg KH wrote:
> I'm curious as to why this is?  Didn't you learn about this in school
> (if you went to school for software development), or from any company
> you have worked for?  At numerous companies I have worked for, it was
> part of the "introduction to company FOO, here's your legal training on
> what to do and not to do with regards to open source."  _ANY_ company
> dealing with Linux should have this type of thing in place, otherwise,
> as I have found out first hand, it can get you in big trouble.

I can only speak for my personal experience, but that hasn't been the case.

Even though I didn't continue with my university in Italy, I don't
remember any copyright law course at least when I was supposed to be
there. And even though in high school I was studying as a programmer, we
only had very basic "law" classes in the first two years (common to
non-programmers) and none in the final three.

As for companies I worked for — no, not really. Actually at least at one
of them I was the one introducing them to the complexity of license
handling (with a final "you better call a lawyer up" note, for obvious
reasons).

So no, I'd venture to say that it's not as common as you seem to expect,
which yes, is appalling.

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

[Petteri Räty]

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On 19.11.2012 19.02, Greg KH wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 07:41:54AM -0500, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
>> Thank you for these responses because they did help me understand
>> copyright/left better.  I appreciate your expertise in the matter
>> and would hope I can draw on it again in the future, because despite
>> what you said a few emails ago, copyright/left is not something that
>> every software developer understands.
> 
> I'm curious as to why this is?  Didn't you learn about this in school
> (if you went to school for software development), or from any company
> you have worked for?  At numerous companies I have worked for, it was
> part of the "introduction to company FOO, here's your legal training on
> what to do and not to do with regards to open source."  _ANY_ company
> dealing with Linux should have this type of thing in place, otherwise,
> as I have found out first hand, it can get you in big trouble.
> 

In Finland you can graduate with a computer science degree without
taking any law related course. There's an optional course on IT law that
is very good but not everyone takes it. For working in a company the law
assigns copyright of source code automatically to the company. For
proprietary shops the training could mostly be about not touching open
source code without prior approval. So in summary my guess is that there
are many open source contributors around who also work in IT who don't
have the exposure to law you think. For people dealing directly with
Linux it's probably as you say.

Regards,
Petteri



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Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Mon, 19 Nov 2012, Anthony G Basile wrote:

> The other levels are files and projects. So this leads to the other
> confusion, do you touch every file in the project when forking etc.

> The answer appears to be that a file is the unit, but from practice
> I've seen all three. What is correct is what passes in the courts
> and I do not want to, nor have I ever, tested that. [...]

The FSF appears to take the standpoint that the project as a whole is
the unit. In their "Information for maintainers of GNU software" [1]
there is the following paragraph:

| To update the list of year numbers, add each year in which you have
| made nontrivial changes to the package.  [...]  When you add the new
| year, it is not required to keep track of which files have seen
| significant changes in the new year and which have not.  It is
| recommended and simpler to add the new year to all files in the
| package, and be done with it for the rest of the year.

I've also found [2] which says that the above is based on legal advice
from Eben Moglen.

Ulrich

[1] <http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/gnustandards/maintain.texi?root=gnustandards&view=markup>
[2] <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-12/msg00327.html>

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues

[Anthony G. Basile]

On 11/20/2012 04:26 AM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, 19 Nov 2012, Anthony G Basile wrote:
>> The other levels are files and projects. So this leads to the other
>> confusion, do you touch every file in the project when forking etc.
>> The answer appears to be that a file is the unit, but from practice
>> I've seen all three. What is correct is what passes in the courts
>> and I do not want to, nor have I ever, tested that. [...]
> The FSF appears to take the standpoint that the project as a whole is
> the unit. In their "Information for maintainers of GNU software" [1]
> there is the following paragraph:
>
> | To update the list of year numbers, add each year in which you have
> | made nontrivial changes to the package.  [...]  When you add the new
> | year, it is not required to keep track of which files have seen
> | significant changes in the new year and which have not.  It is
> | recommended and simpler to add the new year to all files in the
> | package, and be done with it for the rest of the year.
>
> I've also found [2] which says that the above is based on legal advice
> from Eben Moglen.
>
> Ulrich
>
> [1]<http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/gnustandards/maintain.texi?root=gnustandards&view=markup>
> [2]<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-12/msg00327.html>
>
Thank you Ulrich.  We'll read that carefully and we'll act accordingly.

-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP  : 8040 5A4D 8709 21B1 1A88  33CE 979C AF40 D045 5535
GnuPG ID  : D0455535

Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues

[Ian Stakenvicius]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On 20/11/12 04:26 AM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, 19 Nov 2012, Anthony G Basile wrote:
> 
>> The other levels are files and projects. So this leads to the
>> other confusion, do you touch every file in the project when
>> forking etc.
> 
>> The answer appears to be that a file is the unit, but from
>> practice I've seen all three. What is correct is what passes in
>> the courts and I do not want to, nor have I ever, tested that.
>> [...]
> 
> The FSF appears to take the standpoint that the project as a whole
> is the unit. In their "Information for maintainers of GNU software"
> [1] there is the following paragraph:
> 
> | To update the list of year numbers, add each year in which you
> have | made nontrivial changes to the package.  [...]  When you add
> the new | year, it is not required to keep track of which files
> have seen | significant changes in the new year and which have not.
> It is | recommended and simpler to add the new year to all files in
> the | package, and be done with it for the rest of the year.
> 
> I've also found [2] which says that the above is based on legal
> advice from Eben Moglen.
> 
> Ulrich
> 
> [1]
> <http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/gnustandards/maintain.texi?root=gnustandards&view=markup>
>
> 
[2] <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2005-12/msg00327.html>
> 

I did a quick scan; it seems though that this relates to updating the
scope of a copyright that someone already holds?  IE, not necessarily
relating to the transfer of copyright....
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