udev is pure crap.

For some reason, the kernel developers seem to like the "udev" system. For those of you who've been living under a rock for the past few years: udev is a pile of scripts that react to kernel hotplug events and will start setting up device nodes and go mount them, etc. While this is all probably very nice for users not very familiar with the system, it has one fatal flaw:

It removes the perfectly deterministic and reproducible boot characteristics of a Linux system, and replaces them with something that will work when you're there, but break the next time. According to murphy's law, that "next time" is obviously when you're on vacation, the guy with access to the data center ran under a bus and is in hospital, and the breakage introduced with udev somehow also broke the VPN to your router, so you can't even remotely powercycle the beast. Or so.

I don't like a system that starts playing with my device nodes. I have a static /dev, which does everything I need it to do; when I put a CD-ROM in the drive, I'll mount it myself, thank you. If I change something about my system configuration, I'm perfectly capable of modifying the configuration to match myself. I am perfectly happy with a system that will autoload kernel modules when I plug in some USB device, however, and there's nothing wrong with the ability to create some scripts that will set up stuff the way I want them to be.

Hotplug allows all of that. By using hotplug, a USB mouse Just Works(TM) when I plug it in. There are more things like that, which Just Work. A USB key is not one of them, nor is a CD-ROM. And that's a good thing; I don't want filesystems to be mounted at random just because someone got hold of my laptop for a while.

So don't use udev, I hear you say. And, well, I'm not. But the problem is that the kernel maintainers seem inclined to make it harder and harder to do so. And eventually, the result will be that I'll have to install a system which will break my boot sequence every other day just to be able to have a mouse work two seconds after I plug it in.

Madness.