[Fedora Robotics] unified robots udev and policykit rules package

[Tim Niemueller]

Hi Martin.

I see your point, but I still have my doubts about a single package to 
rule them all.

You did not reply to my question/proposal, so I repeat it:

I haven't looked for it myself, yet, so I'm asking if it is possible to 
have kind of a udev/polkit framework package which:
- sets up a robots group or some kind of entity we can later assign 
devices and their rules to
- include appropriate udev rule and polkit configuration/machinery to 
grant the console user, and any user in a "robots" group, access to said 
devices

Then, add-on packages with udev rules for such devices can be created, 
which hook into this infrastructure, avoiding the need to carry similar 
structure for udev/polkit by themselves. If that framework is a line or 
none besides setting up the group, I'd argue we should try to get this 
group added to wherever for example the dialout group comes from.


A problem is that several of the devices you mentioned (like the 
Arduino), are not robotic devices per se, they simply can be used in 
that domain as well. Therefore having a "robot-control" or similar 
package is not what people would be looking for.

I'd suggest to create per-hardware packages that carry the required 
rules. You could have an arduino package, which has the udev rules and 
anything else required. It is either self-sufficient, or would depend on 
the framework package described above. For other hardware, for example 
the primesense camera, it makes sense to carry the rules in the library 
package. If we would, however, also package libfreenect, my suggestion 
would be create a primesense-udev-rules package, which both of those 
libs depend on.

Hope that makes it clearer. I'm ever more convinced a central package is 
the wrong way, it also reminds me of the bad old times when we had a 
static /dev.

	Tim

-- 
     Tim Niemueller <tim at niemueller.de>      www.niemueller.de
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