Keith Packard writes ("Bug#877024: modemmanager should ask before messing with
serial ports"):
> That requires fixing the package instead of just getting it out of the
> way, a significantly harder thing to manage.
This has gone far enough. I would like to remind you of Constitution
6.3(5)
| The Technical Committee does not engage in design of new proposals
| and policies. Such design work should be carried out by individuals
| privately or together and discussed in ordinary technical policy
| and design forums.
|
| The Technical Committee restricts itself to choosing from or
| adopting compromises between solutions and decisions which have
| been proposed and reasonably thoroughly discussed elsewhere.
Note the point about forums. If you want to engage in "design of new
proposals", for example your suggestion to drop modemmanager from
default installs, you should do that on the relevant mailing lists for
modemmanager, or network-manager (which normally pulls it in), or
debian-devel.
It is not appropriate to use the TC list to advocate a novel and
radical proposal in this way.
I can see that a naive reading of this dispute is "Ian hates desktoppy
stuff and that's why he hates modemmanagaer and that's why he hates
this modemmanager behaviour". But it is not accurate. The
functionality in modemmanager is important to lots of people. The
fact that I'm not using modemmanager right now is more to do with the
exact vagaries of hardware support than anything else.
All I am saying is that modemmanager must not, even if it seems
convenient, take these IMO unacceptable risks with people's serial
ports. That is, the safety, security and software reliability of the
users with "stuff" connected to their serial ports should take
precedence over the convenience of the users who need modemmanager.
And this is true even if they are the same people: someone who has
"stuff" connected to their serial ports, and also needs modemmanager,
should find that Debian has prioritised not putting them at risk and
not breaking their stuff, over making their telephony experience more
convenient.
Since the maintainers and upstream evidently disagree with this
tradeoff, it has been necessary for me to ask the TC to step in.
I would like the TC to, overruling the maintainers:
* Confirm the principle that modemmanager (and indeed other software
in Debian) should not probe serial devices unless:
- the user has given explicit permission; or
- the device is known, for whatever reason, to definitely
be a modem (or whatever kind of thing the program wants)
* Say that, in the absence of a better solution, my patch should
be applied to modemmanager.
* Explicitly say that the TC expects the decision to be implemented
in a way that the maintainers approve of, if possible, so long as
that doesn't involve a large amount of additional work.
Thanks,
Ian.
