Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale

[Dale]

Iain Buchanan wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 18:23 -0600, Dale wrote:
>
>> Iain Buchanan wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 23:25 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Monday 18 January 2010 22:47:05 Dale wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> In that case, ctrl alt F1 does nothing.  You also need to understand
>>>>> that most people don't even know how to use SysRq keys.  I didn't and
>>>>> had to do a hard shutdown.  I had to actually pull the plug to do any
>>>>> good.  Luckily I knew how to get it to boot into single user mode so I
>>>>> could disable hal otherwise I would be right back on the same screen
>>>>> again with no mouse or keyboard.  It would be really bad if even that
>>>>> didn't work with devicekit.  I'm not sure how it couldn't but we never
>>>>> know do we?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Dale's experiences highlight a very important and very fundamental rule of
>>>> desktop system design:
>>>>
>>>> As a developer you must completely and totally guarantee to the full limit of
>>>> what is feasible, that the user will always have a usable keyboard, mouse and
>>>> display after the desktop has launched. You can fallback to VGA resolution and
>>>> the most basic keyboard layout possible if you need to, but you must give the
>>>> user something and never leave them stranded. Anything else is just an epic
>>>> fail.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> My 2c worth is this:  In any other distribution, the xorg/hal update
>>> would have been configured so that Dale's (sorry to keep using you as an
>>> example :) keyboard / mouse was working.  But this is Gentoo.  You ARE
>>> the distributor AND the end user.  Conflicts in libraries / packages are
>>> up to you to resolve.
>>>
>>> About 3-4 people use Gentoo at work, and at least 2 were hit by the
>>> keyboard/mouse not working bug in xorg when it moved to HAL.  With a bit
>>> of fuddling, remerging, and so on, we got it working in both cases.
>>>
>>> So yes, the developer must give a fallback method of using the
>>> keyboard / mouse, but not against the incorrectly packaged / configured
>>> system.  In Gentoo you often end up with an incorrect system, hence
>>> revdep-rebuild and so on.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> I didn't distribute hal,
>>
>
> well, in a sense you've distributed it to yourself, as opposed to using
> a binary distribution where all these packages are rebuilt by someone
> else and distributed to you.
>
>
>>  heck, I didn't even want it really.  It's
>> required by KDE is the only reason I have it at all.  I just had to
>> disable it for xorg is all to get a working X.
>>
>> Surely this wasn't my fault?
>>
>
> no, but my point was a binary OS would re-compile everything multiple
> times on some super-server of theirs before you download and try it.
> Hence in that case you're the user, not the distributor.  In Gentoo's
> case you're the user AND the distributor, and 99.9% of the time you
> don't need to recompile the universe to end up with a working system.
> I'm sure that there is some magic package that just needs to be
> re-merged that would fix the issue for you, but I'm sure you've spent
> enough time on it, so I'm not suggesting you try :)
>
>

To me, if I distribute something, I make it available to others.  The 
Gentoo mirrors, they distribute software.  KDE distributes software as 
does other software makers.  I just download it and use it.  This is one 
reason I don't worry about a license that is restricted since whatever I 
do here, stays here.  I don't make the software, compiled or otherwise, 
available to others.

I'm just a lowly user and try to help when I can.  ^-^

Dale

:-)  :-)