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

[Iain Buchanan]

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 :)

-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>

The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth
of Perl culture rather than the Perl core.
             -- Larry Wall in <199705101952.MAA00756@××××.org>