floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 13:41:57 +0100,
  Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> 
> ACPI turned out to be full of lies. The real problem is that machines 
> will report a floppy controller even if they have no floppy drives 
> attached, and the ACPI function that's supposed to return a list of 
> drives usually returns a mixture of falsehoods and untruths. Merely 
> havig a floppy controller is enough to get the floppy driver loaded, 
> which then hangs for ages looking for a drive.

Thanks for the explanation.

> There's no way to get any feedback from the gameport driver as to (a) 
> whether there's anything plugged in, or (b) what is plugged in. We could 
> have the gameport driver automatically pull in analog but that'd 
> probably break people doing midi or using some more specialised input 
> device. It's a hard problem that only impacts a pretty tiny set of 
> people, so it's prioritised somewhere below the hard problems that 
> impact a pretty large set of people.

Again thanks for the explanation. I had figured gameports might be hard
to detect so I wasn't too worried about this. I did want to mention
what you needed to include on the modprobe command to get the the driver
loaded in case someone wandered accross the thread later.