RFC: Listening for devices being added - udev vs. X11

[Martin Kelly]

> Udev == systemd, so for feature-proof I put my chips on X11 ;-). We
> are talking about what, maybe 20 lines of code? I doubt it will be
> much smaller in gudev, which is a new dependency for xfce4-settings.
>
> That said, 2 paths (monitoring) leading to the same end result is a no
> go, it will only lead to confusing bug reports.
>
> So X11 is the only good option, unless it is impossible and gudev is
required.
>
Personally, it seems silly to me to add X code that will likely be thrown
away at some point. X is legacy and the code to manage it is likely to be
ugly. I understand that maintaining  *BSD compatibility is important, but
if we have a useful library on Linux that makes the relevant codepath easy
to understand, why not use it for the Linux case? At this point, udev is
present in pretty much all Linux installs, even those without systemd, so
it is well-supported and is the future for device detection (whereas X will
eventually die off). It seems wrong to create more work for ourselves by
purposefully writing new code against a legacy library when there's a newer
library readily available and I've already written and tested the relevant
code against it.

Could we get a few more XFCE developer opinions on this? I'm happy to add X
support for *BSD, but it seems silly to rewrite my current, working gudev
code for Linux just so that we can throw it away a few years from now.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/attachments/20140421/f1c899fd/attachment.html>