Re: Question to the Debian GNOME maintainers about udev
On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 11:54:44AM -0400, Derek Piper wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I apologise for the cross-posting and if this is not the right forum
> in which to bring this up, but I'd like to ask this: *Why* does gnome have
> a dependency to udev? Can it not simply utilize the hotplug features of
> udev if it exists and just use the regular /dev directory if not?
> I am in this predicament:
>
> I want to upgrade a couple of machines to kernel 2.6.16
>
> Apparently you need a later version of udev than is in the debian stable
> branch (0.056). I upgraded another machine to 2.6.16 but not the udev
> and it crashed relatively quickly. Updated the udev from backports.org
> to 0.087 and all is fine. In doing so it removed gnome from that
> machine, not to worry on that one since I wasn't using it anyway.
>
> The problem is that I have another machine that I use for audio work
> that I would like to have the gnome-volume-control available on but I
> want to upgrade its kernel too. Now the dependency rears its ugly head
> since I can't upgrade udev without uninstalling gnome (I guess because
> udev gets uninstalled and then drags off gnome with it). I want the
> latest kernel on here to make sure I get all the driver updates since
> I'm resolving sound issues.
>
> If gnome just RECOMMENDED the hotplug/udev package instead of being tied
> to it it'd be a *lot* smarter and would allow udev to be upgraded
> independently of gnome, which is the way is should be since they really
> don't RELY on each other.
>
> I moved to Debian so I didn't have to do all this dependency-hell like
> Redhat so I'm kind of aggravated by it.
>
> So, back to the original question. Why have a dependency?
gnome depends on gnome-volume-manager, which needs hal, which needs udev. And
as you probably noticed an stable hal won't work with with unstable udev,
which is what causes your problem.
Now what the gnome package gives you is the full gnome desktop, which
includes gnome-volume-manager, so that's why the dependency is there. You
can ofcourse have a gnome desktop without gnome-volume-manager, just remove
the gnome, gnome-desktop-environment meta-packages, hal and
gnome-volume-manager. But keep the parts of gnome you want.
Sjoerd
--
It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do,
that makes life blessed.
-- Goethe
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