upgrade udev on Ubuntu 14.04

[Scott Kitterman]

On Saturday, March 14, 2015 06:27:14 PM Aron Xu wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 4:33 PM, Qiang Huang <h.huangqiang at huawei.com>
> 
> wrote:
> > Hi list,
> > 
> > I'm a Docker user, for some reason, I need to use Docker on Ubuntu 14.04
> > with devicemapper driver, but we got a serious problem because udev on
> > Ubuntu 14.04 is too old to support sync, see details:
> > https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/4036
> > 
> > Seems no one ever got around of this problem, I wonder if we can upgrade
> > udev
> > on Ubuntu 14.04 in a smooth way, e.g. from udev 204 to udev 208.
> > (RHEL7 with udev 208 don't have this problem, so I assume udev 208 would
> > work)
> 
> Please ask (and help) back-porting it, that's what -backports repository
> lives for. See the procedure:
> 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBackports
> 
> Pushing a new major version to -updates repository does not work with
> current policy except some extreme situations (in theory).

Note this from the backports page:

> Continued Functionality of Reverse-Dependencies
> 
> In addition to the backported package itself working, any other software
> that depends on the backported package must continue to run with the
> backported package installed, and any package that has a build-dependency
> on the backported package must build with the new package installed.

Udev has potential impact on a LOT of packages.  It's part of ubuntu-minimal, 
so present in all Ubuntu installations and configurations.  I'm not sure it's 
feasible to validate non-impact for an official backport.

The Ubuntu tech board is in the midst of discussion about supporting docker in 
older releases, so I would imagine they will have to consider how to handle 
this.  I don't think it's straight forward for -backports either.

Scott K

Scott K