Warning: negative karma detected

There's some sort of a fight going on between Joshua Kwan and Marco d'Itri. I'm, like, ->this<- far away from suggesting someone else takes over maintenance of udev. Marco has a serious problem in 'listening to his users'; this is an incredibly bad attitude if part of the intended audience of your software are 'desktop users that do not necessarily understand the system'. And yes, this makes using his packages unnecessarily hard:

  • A few days ago, I explained on the -devel mailinglist why I seriously dislike using udev, to the point that I far prefer using a static /dev over udev. One of the reasons I feel that way is that udev has a number of race conditions in it. Since race conditions result in unpredictable situations so that bugs appear sometimes, but not always, this type of bugs is usually rather hard to debug (except if you know about the sorry state of udev). Marco's reply was that the issue is basically solved with 'RUN rules', so I was quite pleased. However, the very next day Daniel Burrows reported how he's having problems with race conditions in udev. So either Marco was lying or overly optimistic or something similar in saying that the issue is solved, or the udev package ships without these RUN rules and requires you to write them yourself — including the ones for such default things such as mice. And no, the fact that Christian Perrier, who's sitting three chairs to my left as I write this, is also reporting problems with udev suggests that Daniel isn't mistaken or using an old version.
  • When Joshua and others suggested on IRC that it would be a good idea to ship a udev which supports a kernel that is actually in Debian, rather than one which isn't even supported on all architectures yet, Marco d'Itri tells him to 'grow up', completely ignores him, and claims that maintaining two branches, even if temporarily, would be too much a hassle. I'm getting increasingly annoyed with Marco's attitude of "I'm the maintainer, so I'm king and you can go fuck yourself" regarding anything he maintains. Marco, if you really insist on uploading stuff that requires stuff that isn't in main yet, then at least upload it to experimental. That's what it's for — and, yes, experimental is autobuilt these days.

Well. At least he hasn't been so crazy to make hotplug depend on udev yet. If he ever tries doing that, I'll just ITP something called 'hotplug-no-udev', which 'Provides: hotplug' or so...