On Sun, Nov 27, 2005 at 10:56:10PM +0000, Philip Dillon-Thiselton wrote: > Touche. You know, you could have just said, "Shut up, Phil." and saved > yourself some typing.
Hehe, I didn't want to insult, Phil. You're just frustated and that's cool - I understand that. Just be nice to others and they'll be nice back. > I'll try the diplomatic way. > > Please can someone explain why hwdetect has been hardcoded into the Arch > initscripts rather than provided separately as most similar tools are. > Can someone also explain why this does not violate the KISS philosophy > on which Arch is based and many of us have come to rely on. > > How's that? Better? Much better. And not hard at all, was it? Tpowa saw the new kernel trend approaching (ie, the modalias /sys exports) and realized that this method is closer to plain, unadulterated "Linux" than hotplug, lshwd or any variants. It is hardware detection done by the kernel itself, more or less. We just have a script that facilitates the actual loading of the detected modules. The intent was never to break systems or cause large annoyances, but like most transitions, it has done both to some people. Though I hope the broken systems and annoyances are both temporary, and I hope the overall advtanages and elegance of the new system will pay off in the long run. As for this being an anti-Arch movement, I think you're wrong. Arch likes simple and elegant. hwdetect is both. Read it. It's basically a glorified `modprobe $(find /sys/devices -name modalias)`. How much simpler does it get? In my eyes, we've improved simplicity while still giving the admin utter choice over their hardware detection method. It is "hardcoded" into rc.sysinit, but a setting in rc.conf disables it. lshwd is still provided in Base, as well as hotplug, and both are trivial to enable. The feature hwdetect exploits is also a new, relatively-undiscovered feature. And as stated in the Arch manual[1], we are keen on adopting new systems and features if we see merit and longevity in them. Sometimes we're wrong too -- it sucks but it happens. Nobody trained us to maintain a distribution and make decisions that affect thousands of people. So we learn as we go. Sometimes we take risks, but we try to calculate them before betting the farm on something, and it usually pays off in the end. Forgive us in these tumultuous times when flux is high and complaints ubiquitous. It will pass and things will be groovy again. As an aside, I have asked tpowa to tone down on the initscripts updates unless the fixes are critical. He said the last fix actually repairs unbootable systems for custom kernels <2.6.12, so I think he made a good judgement call there. In the future, we will try to keep this kind of package flux in the Testing repo, not Current. Thanks (to everyone) for your understanding here. We truly do appreciate it. - Judd [1] Well, it doesn't say exactly that. It actually says "Arch Linux also strives to use some of the newer features that are available to linux users, such as hotplug and udev support." But we can broaden that statement, I think. There are many toys to play with. _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
