Iain Buchanan wrote:
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 :)
To me, if I distribute something, I make it available to others. The
Gentoo mirrors, they distribute software. KDE distributes software as
does other software makers. I just download it and use it. This is one
reason I don't worry about a license that is restricted since whatever I
do here, stays here. I don't make the software, compiled or otherwise,
available to others.
I'm just a lowly user and try to help when I can. ^-^
Dale
:-) :-)
