On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 18:23 -0600, Dale wrote: > Iain Buchanan wrote: > > On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 23:25 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > > > >> On Monday 18 January 2010 22:47:05 Dale wrote: > >> > >>> In that case, ctrl alt F1 does nothing. You also need to understand > >>> that most people don't even know how to use SysRq keys. I didn't and > >>> had to do a hard shutdown. I had to actually pull the plug to do any > >>> good. Luckily I knew how to get it to boot into single user mode so I > >>> could disable hal otherwise I would be right back on the same screen > >>> again with no mouse or keyboard. It would be really bad if even that > >>> didn't work with devicekit. I'm not sure how it couldn't but we never > >>> know do we? > >>> > >> Dale's experiences highlight a very important and very fundamental rule of > >> desktop system design: > >> > >> As a developer you must completely and totally guarantee to the full limit > >> of > >> what is feasible, that the user will always have a usable keyboard, mouse > >> and > >> display after the desktop has launched. You can fallback to VGA resolution > >> and > >> the most basic keyboard layout possible if you need to, but you must give > >> the > >> user something and never leave them stranded. Anything else is just an > >> epic > >> fail. > >> > > > > My 2c worth is this: In any other distribution, the xorg/hal update > > would have been configured so that Dale's (sorry to keep using you as an > > example :) keyboard / mouse was working. But this is Gentoo. You ARE > > the distributor AND the end user. Conflicts in libraries / packages are > > up to you to resolve. > > > > About 3-4 people use Gentoo at work, and at least 2 were hit by the > > keyboard/mouse not working bug in xorg when it moved to HAL. With a bit > > of fuddling, remerging, and so on, we got it working in both cases. > > > > So yes, the developer must give a fallback method of using the > > keyboard / mouse, but not against the incorrectly packaged / configured > > system. In Gentoo you often end up with an incorrect system, hence > > revdep-rebuild and so on. > > > > > > I didn't distribute hal,
well, in a sense you've distributed it to yourself, as opposed to using a binary distribution where all these packages are rebuilt by someone else and distributed to you. > heck, I didn't even want it really. It's > required by KDE is the only reason I have it at all. I just had to > disable it for xorg is all to get a working X. > > Surely this wasn't my fault? no, but my point was a binary OS would re-compile everything multiple times on some super-server of theirs before you download and try it. Hence in that case you're the user, not the distributor. In Gentoo's case you're the user AND the distributor, and 99.9% of the time you don't need to recompile the universe to end up with a working system. I'm sure that there is some magic package that just needs to be re-merged that would fix the issue for you, but I'm sure you've spent enough time on it, so I'm not suggesting you try :) -- Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au> The whole intent of Perl 5's module system was to encourage the growth of Perl culture rather than the Perl core. -- Larry Wall in <199705101952.maa00...@wall.org>