With Udev, is hotplug really necessary?
 

As I am starting to become familiar with Udev and its ability run external programs based on events, is hotplug still necessary anymore? I am running Gentoo and the HAL/DBUS system seems to have broken my hotplug system; my auto-backup scripts (for USB keys) don't work anymore. I was thinking of just scrapping hotplug and performing all of my backups through Udev instead. Is this the best way to do it or am I over-generalizing the two?

Recent versions of udev can take the place of hotplug. In fact, most of my systems run udev without hotplug.

Thanks for the quick response; I will uninstall hotplug right now. Since I need to wait for HAL to mount the drive, should I have it call the backup script and put a sleep statement in there or is there a better way? My USB key rule is a higher precedence (60-usbhd.rules) than HAL (90-hal.rules.) Maybe I should just set the 60-usbhd.rules to 91-usbhd.rules and there won't be any latency issues?