Re: [gentoo-dev] Changing order of default virtual/udev provider

[Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com>]

On 9 February 2016 at 18:27, Anthony G. Basile <blueness@gentoo.org> wrote:
> all the vitriolic attacks i get about eudev come from the gentoo
> community.  outside of this community i get praise.


In case my  earlier messages stating a desire to exercise much caution
gave the wrong impression, I just want to state for the record I think
its awesome eudev exists, and I think its awesome other distro's are
using it.

Just when it comes to "Change the defaults", I want to be certain
about the path we're setting ourselves up for on this very important
component, because here, a change of defaults paves a broader path for
eudev to be a potential leading competition to systemd.

Because if we do that, I feel we must be so sure of ourselves that
eudev can be a profitable choice for at least a moderately long term,
even in the event we get no more support from the systemd codebase.

Having it in tree and having users who know what they're doing being
able to choose their own risk factors and say "yeah, eudev is the
right choice for what I'm doing" is one thing.

But stating implicitly that "Hey, this is the default", this needs to
be the *best* recommendation we can make based on all the other
factors and other defaults Gentoo uses.

Because new users *will* be inclined to pick the default, and
*existing* users of the *current* default are likely to see the
default change, and reason "well, the default has changed, so the new
default is the new best thing", and will be inclined to switch.

And the worst thing we could have is a combination of bad defaults
that leads new users to have a poor first experience because they used
all the default recommendations, and their system made magic smoke
instead of booting.

In short, to change *this* default, it seems pertinent that we *know*
that the change we're making *is* better and a more reliable long-term
choice than the *current* default, and if there is *any reasonable
doubt*, we should delay changing until that reasonable doubt is
expunged.

-- 
Kent

KENTNL - https://metacpan.org/author/KENTNL