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

Dik Takken d.h.j.takken at xs4all.nl
Fri Jan 16 20:58:19 CET 2009


Op zaterdag 3 januari 2009, schreef 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.

Wel, KDE has a responsibility in communicating to the user. Underlying system 
components, like UDEV, generally cannot do that.

> 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.

Almost correct, I'm on Gentoo... :) Yes, persistent naming varies between 
distro's. Weather you enable it or not, there are always cases which suck. In 
both situations, the system just assumes that the user does or does not want 
persistent naming. 

> 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?

Various non-KDE programs (Xine for instance) and system services. 

I guess you're right when you say that having KDE try to fix UDEV issues will 
do more harm than good. I understand that most of the major desktop distro's 
don't use persistent naming anyway. So, the risk of puzzled "my new DVD drive 
is dead" users is low.. :) I wasn't aware of that. Distro's that *do* have 
persistent naming (Debian, Gentoo) aren't supposed to work out of the box 
anyway, and their users don't want the desktop environment to touch their 
precious config files.

Case closed :)

Thanks for your responses,

Dik



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