[Kde-hardware-devel] Bug 179127: respond to user replacing hardware

[Drew Fisher]

I agree that there is a problem to be solved (software not working
out-of-box after a hardware change), but I think that it should not be
one that is KDE's responsibility to solve.

Persistent naming schema are actually up to the individual distros.
The udev source package includes rules files from debian, frugalware,
gentoo, redhat, slackware, and suse.  I venture a guess that you're running a
Debian-based system, which indeed does create unique, persistent symlinks
on a per-hardware-item basis.

UDEV configuration files are a system-wide change, and if incorrectly
done, could mean that the user no longer has any network or cdrom support.
As I see it, that's a bigger stake than certain software packages (that
aren't part of KDE) not working after the hardware change.  Further, as
these system-wide changes are distro-dependent, they would be difficult to
maintain, and since they are a hack to fix someone else's bad programming,
I can't feel that it's KDE's job to take on that responsibility.

I absolutely agree that KDE and its applications should gracefully
handle hardware changes.  If they don't, then we've failed to provide
the solutions that we wanted from Solid.  If distros choose to provide
UDEV scripts that cause issues with some software packages, the burden
should be on them to work around them.

If KDE applications behave properly after a hardware change, then we
have supported the user experience as far as we safely can.

If non-KDE applications aren't working properly because they can't change
which hardware device they directly access, I don't think it's within
KDE's realm of responsibility to support the developers' programming
habits by making system-wide and distro-dependent changes.  These issues
should probably be bugs filed against the individual applications that
don't work after the hardware change, or against Debian for the UDEV
rules that cause the named issues.

Dik, which programs did you encounter issues with when changing cdrom
drives or network cards?

-Drew Fisher