Kudzu and automatic detection

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, 6 Dec 2004 11:13:51 -0500, Dimitrie O. Paun <dpaun at rogers.com> wrote:
> Of course there is, what do you mean "kudzu properly removes/adds printer".
> This is silly, once it's added and configured, it shouldn't remove/add
> it on every reboot!

If a piece of hardware is no longer available, shouldn't it be unconfigured?
Certainly you don't want the printer server to pretend a printer is
available locally when it isn't...that's certaintly not the ideal
behavior.  In a perfect world... the automation provided in the
project utopia software stack (udev,hal, etc...) would be able to
sense the existance of all hardware and automate the configuation and
unconfiguration as soon as any device is attached or detached. But
some hardware can't be sensed yet in the scope of the udev/hal
stack....yet, leaving a place for a boot time hardware
probing/polling/poking application like kudzu (or discover) to try to
handle the hardware that can not be sensed inside the project utopia
stack, in an effort to crudely duplicate what udev/hal would be doing.
In the perfect solution, unconfiguration wouldn't be limited to
bootup.. it would happen anytime the device was removed from the
system. This is what happens when udev/hal works correctly..and what
kudzu has to try to emulate at bootup.

> If I *manually" have to do stuff, it's broken.

If i have to manually reconfigure settings to suit my prefences...
things are broken?
So when I ask gnome to turn my lower panel into a autohiding
panel...that means gnome is broken? I didn't realize that the computer
could read my thoughts.

The issue isn't whether or not you have to "manually" reconfigure your
computer to suit your individual preferences. The issue is, does the
default behavior make sense for the designed for usage case.  I think
its perfectly reasonable for kudzu to be unconfiguring printers such
as parallel port printers and other hardware that the project utopia
stack can not deal with. I think its debatable about whether kudzu
should be ignoring them or not... but i don't see any broken
behavior.. i see at most duplication of similar behavior..that is NOT
causing an operational problem. For usb devices the uptopia software
stack wll be doing pretty much the same thing... unconfiguration
printers when not available...configuring printers where then they
are, but in a more sophisticated way.  I see no brokenness in the
original post, I see overlapping but yet compatible functionality
during a transitional period when udev/hal is being introduced into
the system.

-jef