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

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 15:12 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Simo Sorce <simo at redhat.com> said:
> > I said:
> > A) 99.9% of users do not needed the floppy anymore
> > B) I said hang for "long periods" and not "forever", where here "long"
> > is of course relative to modern machine boot times.
> 
> You said:
> 
>    It seem much more intelligent to add a package owners of floppies can
>    install, so that 99.9% of the others do not have to wait forever for no
>    reason.
> 
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-August/156261.html
> 
> To me, that reads as "99.9% of non-floppy owners have to wait forever".

Ok, reasonable misunderstanding, I didn't mean it that way, sorry.

> In any case, instead of arguing semantics, can you answer my actual
> question?  How many systems hang when floppy.ko is loaded?  If it is a
> large number, it should be easy to point to lots of data.

They do not 'hang', they just take longer to boot, sometimes a lot
longer. The point is that given most machines do not even ship with a
floppy drive anymore it seem entirely reasonable to spare the wait to
most users because they do not need that support anyway (and even most
of those who have a floppy driver do not use it ever). While for those
few that need it, then having to install a simple package to enable the
support by default seem sensible and good enough.

I don't think I have anything more to add to that.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York