bluez and hci's which initially come up as hid (was Re: Some days it just doesn't pay to update)

[Jonathan Corbet]

On Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:18:31 +0200
Hans de Goede <hdegoede at redhat.com> wrote:

> Which is in essence the problem you are seeing here Jonathan, after
> my bluez update, your bluetooth dongle is actually being out into
> HCI mode, so that it can for example also be used to sync with your
> phone, use a bluetooth headset, etc. IOW this is a feature not a bug
> but this does mean that in order to use your bluetooth mouse /
> keyboard, you need to explicitly pair them with the bluetooth HCI once,
> which will require the use of a regular usb keyboard, which is, erm,
> not so good, one could even argue this is a bug after all.

I guess I would argue that the vast majority of users who get one of these
Logitech keyboards simply want a keyboard; they don't really care that
they got a general-purpose Bluetooth adapter in the deal.  So breaking
that by default doesn't necessarily seem like the right idea.  That said...

> This also brings us back to my: "I'm really really surprised about the
> "has Just Worked for years" bit", since we've been shipping hid2hci
> + udev rules for years (and this issue has been reported by others long
> before).

...it sounds like it's maybe been broken in this way for a while?  My
machine has been riding the Rawhide train for years, it's possible it
doesn't correspond to what I'd get if I just dumped F15 onto it.

> The questions is how do we want to handle this? At least we should
> release note this I guess, but perhaps we can do something smarter?

Perhaps the first thing to do is to try to figure out if it's only me.
Nobody else has griped on the Rawhide front, but, then, I think I may be
about the only Rawhide user left (and people keep telling me that I
shouldn't be there either).  If it's only me I'll figure out how to put
the keyboard into a mode where it's agreeable to pairing, grumble for a
moment, and get on with my life.

If others are affected, it would be nice to detect the situation and put
up a little warning, preferably on the login screen.  Not sure how easy
that would be to do.

Thanks for the explanation,

jon