Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
- Original Message From: pk pete...@coolmail.se BRM wrote: The point of the UI is that you ought not care what goes where, unless you are debugging the UI or the program itself. While a UI is important; a good UI is key. And a plain text editor is, imo, a good UI; everybody knows how to use it. Why bring in another extra (translation) layer? That's only good if you always store all options - every possible combination, etc. - at all times. Unfortunately, that's almost never the case. Thus you need to be able to know how to create a good working configuration. This requires having a tool the user can use to edit the configuration, with the tool providing access to the options you otherwise would not know about that also protects you by helping to ensure the configuration is in the valid format. Of course, the tool also has to get upgraded with the changes in the program - so that it knows how to build correct configurations. This is where XML does somewhat shine for configurations - you can get by with a little less by enabling the tool to use XML validation on the configuration file; then even if your tool falls a little behind, it can still validate the configuration file against the DTD/RNG/Schema. But it also means that you MUST have a tool. Ben
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Alan McKinnon wrote: Another layer can be good, if properly abstracted. A good example is KDE's popups when you plug in a hotswap storage device. You get a context-sensitive popup asking you what you want to do and the choices are sane. You say what you want to do and don't worry about the implementation. This is good. This is not something that we would agree on; I don't use any automounter. I prefer to manually mount. So in this particular case another layer would be bad (for me). I guess I'm a bit of a minimalist. XML OTOH was designed for a very specific purpose, and what hal does is not it. Too many UIs for things like this take the exact same info in the file, shuffle it around a bit, display some bits in green and other bits in red, and then try and proclaim that this is a VeryGoodThing(tm). Which purpose? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_markup_languages But I've been around a long time and by now have a finely honed bullshit detector. It rings alarm bells when I look at the implementation of hal (but not the idea of hal). Well, I think we are in disagreement here as well... HAL is deprecated/removed (starting) from a future Xorg release (server-1.8?) and in it's place is Udev (via libudev) which is all well and good (imo). Why add another layer when it's not needed? What would HAL accomplish when all it does is listen to what udev says? What Devicekit/Udisks will be used for, I don't know/care... Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
- Original Message From: Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com On Tuesday 19 January 2010 22:36:45 BRM wrote: Or a pretty GUI with clicky boxes to change the settings while never letting the user see the contents of the XML. Once the user interface is in place it doesn't matter whether it is XML or something else. The key is that is has a user interface, you can do a INI format and still be just as crappy. Classic examples are the windows registry editor and gconf. My god, I hate both. It seems like the devs just chomped an XML file and rotated it 90 degrees to get an expandable tree view. True - good examples of horrid interfaces. Needless to say... Which does absolutely nothing to aid my understanding of what goes where. The point of the UI is that you ought not care what goes where, unless you are debugging the UI or the program itself. While a UI is important; a good UI is key. BRM
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
BRM wrote: The point of the UI is that you ought not care what goes where, unless you are debugging the UI or the program itself. While a UI is important; a good UI is key. And a plain text editor is, imo, a good UI; everybody knows how to use it. Why bring in another extra (translation) layer? Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Wednesday 20 January 2010 21:01:47 pk wrote: BRM wrote: The point of the UI is that you ought not care what goes where, unless you are debugging the UI or the program itself. While a UI is important; a good UI is key. And a plain text editor is, imo, a good UI; everybody knows how to use it. Why bring in another extra (translation) layer? Another layer can be good, if properly abstracted. A good example is KDE's popups when you plug in a hotswap storage device. You get a context-sensitive popup asking you what you want to do and the choices are sane. You say what you want to do and don't worry about the implementation. This is good. XML OTOH was designed for a very specific purpose, and what hal does is not it. Too many UIs for things like this take the exact same info in the file, shuffle it around a bit, display some bits in green and other bits in red, and then try and proclaim that this is a VeryGoodThing(tm). But I've been around a long time and by now have a finely honed bullshit detector. It rings alarm bells when I look at the implementation of hal (but not the idea of hal). -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:21:18 -0600, Dale wrote: Even easier, hit e at the GRUB menu and add gentoo=nox to the kernel options. I usually just do softlevel=single or that other one I got wrote down here somewhere. That turns off almost everything, whereas gentoo=nox does a normal startup of everything but xdm. Single mode has its uses but it's a bit of a sledgehammer for this particular nut. -- Neil Bothwick WinErr 003: Dynamic linking error - Your mistake is now in every file signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Stroller wrote: On 18 Jan 2010, at 21:50, James Ausmus wrote: Very recent buyers of Lenovo laptops don't even *have* a SysRq key anymore. I reckon it won't be long before other makers follow suit. I can see Lenovo's point: there's probably less than 10,000 people in the whole world that ever used that key in the last 12 months and all of them are very au fait with Linux Yuck - really? Not even as an unlabeled Alt function of a Print Screen button? Sounds like a new kernel patch needs to be introduced, which allows you to select an alternative to the SysRq key for the magic commands... sigh Stupid HW manufacturers... To me, this sounds like rationalisation - in the make more efficient by reorganizing it in such a way as to dispense with unnecessary personnel or equipment sense - on behalf of hardware manufacturers. I would hate to do away with the numeric keypad myself, but at the same time I have to question how often I use it. When I look at the whole keyboard it seems crazy to have 102 or 105 keys in order to type 26 letters, 10 numbers and some punctuation. The function keys of regular keyboards are never used by the majority of people, and it has been this way for over a decade. Yet new keyboards require them because IBM keyboards had them in the 1980s. The authors of window managers map the close window shortcut to alt-F4 because the F4 key is there and is sure to be unused by anything else, but this function could easily be moved elsewhere if we got rid of the extra keyboard clutter. Stroller. This is sort of funny in a way. I use the numeric keypad for numbers about 90% of the time. The only time I use the numbers on the top row are for things that are above the numbers. I also use the function keys a LOT, a whole lot. I couldn't even imagine them not being there and wouldn't buy a keyboard that didn't have the function keys or the numeric keypad. I hope some manufacturers don't shoot themselves in the foot while removing keys. o_O Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Neil Bothwick wrote: On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:21:18 -0600, Dale wrote: Even easier, hit e at the GRUB menu and add gentoo=nox to the kernel options. I usually just do softlevel=single or that other one I got wrote down here somewhere. That turns off almost everything, whereas gentoo=nox does a normal startup of everything but xdm. Single mode has its uses but it's a bit of a sledgehammer for this particular nut. But I can emerge things and fix stuff. That's all I need at the time. I don't even need a second console. It works for me. The sledge hammer is just right. If I do need more, I just type in 'rc boot' and get a little more going. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
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 :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Tuesday 19 January 2010 09:03:57 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:21:18 -0600, Dale wrote: I usually just do softlevel=single or that other one I got wrote down here somewhere. That turns off almost everything, whereas gentoo=nox does a normal startup of everything but xdm. Single mode has its uses but it's a bit of a sledgehammer for this particular nut. Each of my machines has a no-x run level, which omits services such as X, dbus and hal but does start gpm, network services and (except on the laptops) numlock. Saves me quite a bit of typing. -- Rgds Peter.
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Peter Humphrey wrote: On Tuesday 19 January 2010 09:03:57 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:21:18 -0600, Dale wrote: I usually just do softlevel=single or that other one I got wrote down here somewhere. That turns off almost everything, whereas gentoo=nox does a normal startup of everything but xdm. Single mode has its uses but it's a bit of a sledgehammer for this particular nut. Each of my machines has a no-x run level, which omits services such as X, dbus and hal but does start gpm, network services and (except on the laptops) numlock. Saves me quite a bit of typing. Those are good ideas but I just rarely use these. Most of the time booting to single is all I need. The emerges run faster too. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:12:11 -0600, Dale wrote: I usually just do softlevel=single or that other one I got wrote down here somewhere. That turns off almost everything, whereas gentoo=nox does a normal startup of everything but xdm. Single mode has its uses but it's a bit of a sledgehammer for this particular nut. But I can emerge things and fix stuff. That's all I need at the time. As long as you don't need LVM, dmcrypt or anythng else beyond the bare minimum, that's true. But when X is the only problem, a method to disable only X seems appropriate. -- Neil Bothwick If at first you don't succeed, work for Microsoft. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:55:20 +, Peter Humphrey wrote: That turns off almost everything, whereas gentoo=nox does a normal startup of everything but xdm. Single mode has its uses but it's a bit of a sledgehammer for this particular nut. Each of my machines has a no-x run level, which omits services such as X, dbus and hal but does start gpm, network services and (except on the laptops) numlock. Saves me quite a bit of typing. That's what I used to have, until I heard about the nox option. Now I don't bother with maintaining another runlevel. -- Neil Bothwick Save the whales. Collect the whole set. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:09:37 -0600, Dale wrote: I hope some manufacturers don't shoot themselves in the foot while removing keys. o_O They'd have to be using a pretty extreme method of key removal for that to be a risk :P -- Neil Bothwick Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Neil Bothwick wrote: On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:12:11 -0600, Dale wrote: I usually just do softlevel=single or that other one I got wrote down here somewhere. That turns off almost everything, whereas gentoo=nox does a normal startup of everything but xdm. Single mode has its uses but it's a bit of a sledgehammer for this particular nut. But I can emerge things and fix stuff. That's all I need at the time. As long as you don't need LVM, dmcrypt or anythng else beyond the bare minimum, that's true. But when X is the only problem, a method to disable only X seems appropriate. True since I don't use those. I also like that it speeds things up since the only process running is mine. I get back to a working system faster that way. Whichever works is fine with me. This is just my way of doing it. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Stroller wrote: Of course, I use Gentoo on my headless servers, so I am glad that server software - Dovecot or Courier for IMAP, Apache, Samba - all have plain-text configuration files I can edit with vim (which I have been learning to utilise better recently). But even if these switched to XML, a curses XML editor could easily be written. Right. The problem is that that is yet another tool that's needed for the job; quite unnecessarily so, as I see it.Keeping it plain text you can use the tools available (even echo or cat would suffice). Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
- Original Message From: Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:09:16 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: XML is a machine-readable file format that just happens to use ASCII characters, it is not meant to be modified by a text editor, so if your program uses XML configuration files, it should include a means of editing those files that does not include the use of vim. which almost by definition means you need an xml-information parser on par with an xml-parser to figure out what the hell the fields mean, then design an intelligent viewer-editor thingy that lets the user add-delete-change the information in the xml file. All the while displaying to the user at least some information about the fields in view. Making the interface for the config file - XML or otherwise - is far more complex and cumbersome than writing the parser (XML or otherwise). Or a pretty GUI with clicky boxes to change the settings while never letting the user see the contents of the XML. Once the user interface is in place it doesn't matter whether it is XML or something else. The key is that is has a user interface, you can do a INI format and still be just as crappy. The problem is that most don't think through using the XML so much. They just start using it. While I have not had any problems with HAL myself (it just works); I do agree that a good user interface is necessary for the config files - I'd agree that is the case for any program, regardless of its back-end config file format. $0.02 Ben
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Tuesday 19 January 2010 22:36:45 BRM wrote: Or a pretty GUI with clicky boxes to change the settings while never letting the user see the contents of the XML. Once the user interface is in place it doesn't matter whether it is XML or something else. The key is that is has a user interface, you can do a INI format and still be just as crappy. Classic examples are the windows registry editor and gconf. My god, I hate both. It seems like the devs just chomped an XML file and rotated it 90 degrees to get an expandable tree view. Which does absolutely nothing to aid my understanding of what goes where. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Alan McKinnon wrote: The only way to be sure of that is to write your own replacement for HAL. ;) That might not be a bad idea I never agreed with the implementation of hal. An abstract layer sounds good, but why must it abstract ALL hardware? Most software already knows what type of devices it is going to use, so that software should either do it's own abstraction, or a utility library should do it, but be limited to what devices it deals with. Most devices fall into one of two groups: storage and I/O. Auto-mounters do not care about your keyboard, whereas X needs to know about your monitor, card, keyboard, mouse. Why does hal try and abstract both? Seems silly to me. One could also argue that the developer's state of mind is reflected in the chosen method of configuration - xml files. This just defies all understanding. Apart from the fact that real-world xml is almost unreadable, the conditions that make xml useful are simply not present in hal... xml works well when you have system A talking to system B and neither A nor B (nor user C) know in advance exactly what the other is. They might not even know much about the data schema being used, so that metadata is in the xml. This is so completely not the case with hal on a local machine, that it defies description why the dev thought it might be useful. I can't argue with any of that, which is why I decided to quote it in full - it's worth repeating. It seems xml is the fashion with certain programmers. Totally unnecessary. :( Be lucky, Neil http://www.neiljw.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Neil Walker wrote: It seems xml is the fashion with certain programmers. Totally unnecessary. :( Be lucky, Neil http://www.neiljw.com +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed? Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Monday 18 January 2010 12:10:59 Dale wrote: Neil Walker wrote: It seems xml is the fashion with certain programmers. Totally unnecessary. :( Be lucky, Neil http://www.neiljw.com +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed? Only if you suffer from 3 year-old with a hammer syndrome -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Alan McKinnon wrote: On Monday 18 January 2010 12:10:59 Dale wrote: Neil Walker wrote: It seems xml is the fashion with certain programmers. Totally unnecessary. :( Be lucky, Neil http://www.neiljw.com +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed? Only if you suffer from 3 year-old with a hammer syndrome I tried that with hal and it still didn't work. Maybe a 6 year old with a larger hammer would help. ;-) Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:59:07 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Most devices fall into one of two groups: storage and I/O. Auto-mounters do not care about your keyboard, whereas X needs to know about your monitor, card, keyboard, mouse. Why does hal try and abstract both? Seems silly to me. On the other hand, having a single method of configuring such things does give consistency, and means you have to learn only one syntax, but see below. You cannot totally separate the two areas, for example a keylogger may need access to both I/O and storage, so a central, separate resource used by all software is more in keeping with the Unix way than each program including its own implementation. One could also argue that the developer's state of mind is reflected in the chosen method of configuration - xml files. This just defies all understanding. Apart from the fact that real-world xml is almost unreadable, the conditions that make xml useful are simply not present in hal... I couldn't agree more. XML was very fashionable a few years ago, maybe this influenced the developer. Hell, I was even guilty of using it myself :( As an alternative to binary configuration files, XML is a step in the right direction, but it should not be used where users are expected to edit the files. In some ways, the worth or otherwise of HAL, from a user perspective, has been largely obscured by the difficulty in reading, let alone editing, its configuration files. -- Neil Bothwick I am MODERATOR of BORG. Follow the rules or be assimilated.
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 2:14 PM, pk pete...@coolmail.se wrote: Btw, devicekit has been renamed to udisks. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=Nzc2NA The whole of DeviceKit was not renamed, just the DeviceKit-disks program was renamed to udisks. And yes I think it all uses XML config files too, like HAL. :)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 04:10:59AM -0600, Dale wrote: +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed? XML is handy for nested configuration, where various options apply to specific subsets of other configuration items. I could count on one hand the number of times that has actually been the case for any real world program I have worked on. If you use key:value lines, the parsing is so simple that you don't need any outside package, but you still have to clean up lines to remove comments, skip empty lines, and merge consecutive lines -- a few extra lines of code, not enough to even put into a library, let alone turn into a full-blown package. But parsing XML is too much work to reinvent each time, so people write complete parsing packages for it. From the purely programming point of view, those packages are simpler to use than rolling your own for 5 lines, and thus they use them everywhere. Then they think of all sorts of ungodly configuration tricks suddenly made possible, throw them in just because they can, and the poor user gets stuck with the mess. -- ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._. Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman rocket surgeon / fe...@crowfix.com GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E 6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933 I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Dale wrote: Stop lurking and just join me. lol ... Darth Vader: Luke, join me and I will complete your training... ;-) Best regards Peter K
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Paul Hartman wrote: On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 2:14 PM, pk pete...@coolmail.se wrote: Btw, devicekit has been renamed to udisks. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=Nzc2NA The whole of DeviceKit was not renamed, just the DeviceKit-disks program was renamed to udisks. And yes I think it all uses XML config files too, like HAL. :) Well, it's off to a bad start then. Let's see if they correct the errors of the past. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On 1/18/2010 5:10 AM, Dale wrote: +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed? XML allows you to generate complex, structured, hierarchical data that can be read, changed, and stored by well-tested third party libraries that don't need to know anything about the contents or meaning of your configuration data beforehand. This means I, as a developer, don't need to write any code to read and parse configurations, validate the syntax or structure (only the content), or persist it back out. In simpler terms: less time spent on the configuration parser, more time spent being productive. If there was a less-verbose alternative that was as easy to implement, with known stable parsing libraries, that had the same expressiveness as XML, I'd probably use that instead. But when you're talking about data that goes beyond a simple list of name/value pairs, anything attempt to stream it to a flat-file format is going to result in something that is either 1) redundant, or 2) hard to read. I'd go with 2 over 1 any day. In my opinion, if the worst thing you can come up with to complain about is they used XML for their configuration files, then I'd say that software is in pretty good shape. On the other hand, even I can see that HAL has plenty of problems (besides its XML configuration). The fact that it completely fails to work for you being a good example :) --Mike
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Monday 18 January 2010 18:26:21 Mike Edenfield wrote: +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed? XML allows you to generate complex, structured, hierarchical data that can be read, changed, and stored by well-tested third party libraries that don't need to know anything about the contents or meaning of your configuration data beforehand. This means I, as a developer, don't need to write any code to read and parse configurations, validate the syntax or structure (only the content), or persist it back out. In simpler terms: less time spent on the configuration parser, more time spent being productive. Just as code is read many more times than it is written, so is a package configured by the end user many more times than the config parser studied by the developer. Your post makes sense until you realise that the use of XML in a configuration designed to be changed by the user renders the package virtually unusable. Given a choice between me as a developer struggling with a config parser versus vast swathes of users dumping the package because of the same parser, I'd say it's me that has to work harder, not my users. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Alan McKinnon wrote: On Monday 18 January 2010 18:26:21 Mike Edenfield wrote: +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed? XML allows you to generate complex, structured, hierarchical data that can be read, changed, and stored by well-tested third party libraries that don't need to know anything about the contents or meaning of your configuration data beforehand. This means I, as a developer, don't need to write any code to read and parse configurations, validate the syntax or structure (only the content), or persist it back out. In simpler terms: less time spent on the configuration parser, more time spent being productive. Just as code is read many more times than it is written, so is a package configured by the end user many more times than the config parser studied by the developer. Your post makes sense until you realise that the use of XML in a configuration designed to be changed by the user renders the package virtually unusable. Given a choice between me as a developer struggling with a config parser versus vast swathes of users dumping the package because of the same parser, I'd say it's me that has to work harder, not my users. I'll add this, if devicekit uses xml and doesn't work out of the box, as in me not having to config the thing, then it is no better than hal. It may be that if I could do xml that I could have gotten hal to work. Thing is, I can't do xml at the time. I suspect that I am not alone on this. So, it is possible that hal was doomed by xml for me at least. If devicekit uses it, then it may get masked as well. Sounds like devicekit needs to be really good. I'm sort of hooked on a working keyboard and a mouse for some reason. Call me silly but they sort of make the puter work. Still hoping tho. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Mike Edenfield wrote: XML allows you to generate complex, structured, hierarchical data that can be read, changed, and stored by well-tested third party libraries that don't need to know anything about the contents or meaning of your configuration data beforehand. This means I, as a developer, don't need to write any code to read and parse configurations, validate the syntax or structure (only the content), or persist it back out. So, convenience for the lazy programmer should take precedence over usability for the end user? Be lucky, Neil http://www.neiljw.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: On Monday 18 January 2010 18:26:21 Mike Edenfield wrote: +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed? XML allows you to generate complex, structured, hierarchical data that can be read, changed, and stored by well-tested third party libraries that don't need to know anything about the contents or meaning of your configuration data beforehand. This means I, as a developer, don't need to write any code to read and parse configurations, validate the syntax or structure (only the content), or persist it back out. In simpler terms: less time spent on the configuration parser, more time spent being productive. Just as code is read many more times than it is written, so is a package configured by the end user many more times than the config parser studied by the developer. Your post makes sense until you realise that the use of XML in a configuration designed to be changed by the user renders the package virtually unusable. Given a choice between me as a developer struggling with a config parser versus vast swathes of users dumping the package because of the same parser, I'd say it's me that has to work harder, not my users. I'll add this, if devicekit uses xml and doesn't work out of the box, as in me not having to config the thing, then it is no better than hal. It may be that if I could do xml that I could have gotten hal to work. Thing is, I can't do xml at the time. I suspect that I am not alone on this. So, it is possible that hal was doomed by xml for me at least. If devicekit uses it, then it may get masked as well. Sounds like devicekit needs to be really good. I'm sort of hooked on a working keyboard and a mouse for some reason. Call me silly but they sort of make the puter work. Well I think that if everything works as it is designed to you shouldn't really need to be editing those XML files in the first place. I think you're supposed to be able to do all of the relevant config settings in your desktop environment such as Gnome or KDE (if you use one). Like setting keyboard mappings, fonts, mouse config, screen resolution, etc. The usual stuff that used to go in xorg.conf. Of course, if your keyboard mapping is wrong and you can't even log-in to the DE in the first place then configuring it through there will probably be difficult... :) And if you don't use Gnome or KDE then it can get interesting, too...
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Paul Hartman wrote: On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: On Monday 18 January 2010 18:26:21 Mike Edenfield wrote: +1 I do OK with plain text but no clue on the new xml stuff. Why not just keep it simple? Is xml REALLY needed? XML allows you to generate complex, structured, hierarchical data that can be read, changed, and stored by well-tested third party libraries that don't need to know anything about the contents or meaning of your configuration data beforehand. This means I, as a developer, don't need to write any code to read and parse configurations, validate the syntax or structure (only the content), or persist it back out. In simpler terms: less time spent on the configuration parser, more time spent being productive. Just as code is read many more times than it is written, so is a package configured by the end user many more times than the config parser studied by the developer. Your post makes sense until you realise that the use of XML in a configuration designed to be changed by the user renders the package virtually unusable. Given a choice between me as a developer struggling with a config parser versus vast swathes of users dumping the package because of the same parser, I'd say it's me that has to work harder, not my users. I'll add this, if devicekit uses xml and doesn't work out of the box, as in me not having to config the thing, then it is no better than hal. It may be that if I could do xml that I could have gotten hal to work. Thing is, I can't do xml at the time. I suspect that I am not alone on this. So, it is possible that hal was doomed by xml for me at least. If devicekit uses it, then it may get masked as well. Sounds like devicekit needs to be really good. I'm sort of hooked on a working keyboard and a mouse for some reason. Call me silly but they sort of make the puter work. Well I think that if everything works as it is designed to you shouldn't really need to be editing those XML files in the first place. I think you're supposed to be able to do all of the relevant config settings in your desktop environment such as Gnome or KDE (if you use one). Like setting keyboard mappings, fonts, mouse config, screen resolution, etc. The usual stuff that used to go in xorg.conf. Of course, if your keyboard mapping is wrong and you can't even log-in to the DE in the first place then configuring it through there will probably be difficult... :) And if you don't use Gnome or KDE then it can get interesting, too... That was my problem, no keyboard or mouse. Sort of hard to do much in that situation. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: snip That was my problem, no keyboard or mouse. Sort of hard to do much in that situation. Dale Pshaw... ;) ctrl-alt-F1, or, if that doesn't work: alt-SysRq-R alt-F1 Of course, method 2 only works if you have the Magic SysRq keys (or whatever it's called) option enabled in the kernel, and not enough people know about the Magic SysRq keys at this point... -James
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
James Ausmus wrote: On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com mailto:rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: snip That was my problem, no keyboard or mouse. Sort of hard to do much in that situation. Dale Pshaw... ;) ctrl-alt-F1, or, if that doesn't work: alt-SysRq-R alt-F1 Of course, method 2 only works if you have the Magic SysRq keys (or whatever it's called) option enabled in the kernel, and not enough people know about the Magic SysRq keys at this point... -James 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? I could work around it if needed but some other user may not can. What if that hard shutdown corrupts a file system and causes data loss? I'm not just wanting it to work better for me but for others who use Linux and know even less than I do. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: James Ausmus wrote: On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 11:59 AM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com mailto: rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: snip That was my problem, no keyboard or mouse. Sort of hard to do much in that situation. Dale Pshaw... ;) ctrl-alt-F1, or, if that doesn't work: alt-SysRq-R alt-F1 Of course, method 2 only works if you have the Magic SysRq keys (or whatever it's called) option enabled in the kernel, and not enough people know about the Magic SysRq keys at this point... -James 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. snip I know, I just felt like being a smart-ass... ;) 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. snip Another option (I know - too late for you, but might be useful for someone that runs across this on Google), is to press I during the initscript processes - enters Interactive Boot mode, so you can Y/N individual startup scripts, including xdm/X 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? snip I agree - there has been a lot of churn with X/HAL/udev/input devices over the past year or so, and it's really bitten some people badly, certainly not an ideal situation, and the DeviceKit migration really should be tested more thoroughly, in more combinations, than some of the other changes have been. However, the only real way it will get tested in more combinations is if we, the users, try it out early and often, and let the Gentoo devs and/or upstream devs know when we run into problems - anybody who specifically had issues with input devices using HAL would probably be a *very* useful test data point, as they most likely have SW/config/HW combinations that upstream specifically does *not* have - as evidenced by the fact that it broke previously... ;) I could work around it if needed but some other user may not can. What if that hard shutdown corrupts a file system and causes data loss? I'm not just wanting it to work better for me but for others who use Linux and know even less than I do. Dale And this is why it is a Very Good Thing to spread the word about the Magic SysRq keys. Did ctrl-alt-del not do anything, or a single press of the power button (which should send an ACPI shutdown signal, causing the system to self-power-off)? I'll try to stop being a smart-ass, but it's just one of those kind of days... grin -James
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
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. Magic SysRq falls so far short of this that it's not even worth contemplating. It's useful for mega-power users and kernel devs doing really way out things, but for normal users it might as well be invisible. Sure, it's documented in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt. Well now, I offer two comments: I doubt that kernel docs are even installed on most user-centric distros, and anyone want to present an argument why the location of that file and it's contents might be construed as being self-evident and/or obvious? -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Monday 18 January 2010 23:04:56 James Ausmus wrote: And this is why it is a Very Good Thing to spread the word about the Magic SysRq keys. Did ctrl-alt-del not do anything, or a single press of the power button (which should send an ACPI shutdown signal, causing the system to self-power-off)? Forgot to add this juicy bit to my last post: Very recent buyers of Lenovo laptops don't even *have* a SysRq key anymore. I reckon it won't be long before other makers follow suit. I can see Lenovo's point: there's probably less than 10,000 people in the whole world that ever used that key in the last 12 months and all of them are very au fait with Linux -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.comwrote: On Monday 18 January 2010 23:04:56 James Ausmus wrote: And this is why it is a Very Good Thing to spread the word about the Magic SysRq keys. Did ctrl-alt-del not do anything, or a single press of the power button (which should send an ACPI shutdown signal, causing the system to self-power-off)? Forgot to add this juicy bit to my last post: Very recent buyers of Lenovo laptops don't even *have* a SysRq key anymore. I reckon it won't be long before other makers follow suit. I can see Lenovo's point: there's probably less than 10,000 people in the whole world that ever used that key in the last 12 months and all of them are very au fait with Linux Yuck - really? Not even as an unlabeled Alt function of a Print Screen button? Sounds like a new kernel patch needs to be introduced, which allows you to select an alternative to the SysRq key for the magic commands... sigh Stupid HW manufacturers... -James
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
James Ausmus wrote: I'll try to stop being a smart-ass, but it's just one of those kind of days... grin -James I have those days too. They tend to come in bunches tho. ;-) Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:50:36 -0800, James Ausmus wrote: Very recent buyers of Lenovo laptops don't even *have* a SysRq key anymore. I reckon it won't be long before other makers follow suit. I can see Lenovo's point: there's probably less than 10,000 people in the whole world that ever used that key in the last 12 months and all of them are very au fait with Linux Yuck - really? Not even as an unlabeled Alt function of a Print Screen button? Shouldn't even need Alt, SysRq is PrtScn. Sounds like a new kernel patch needs to be introduced, which allows you to select an alternative to the SysRq key for the magic commands... sigh Stupid HW manufacturers... That's been possible for years. I remember doing something, but not the details, to use another key for this on my PPC iBook. -- Neil Bothwick Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning I can't configure Slackware. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:04:56 -0800, James Ausmus wrote: Another option (I know - too late for you, but might be useful for someone that runs across this on Google), is to press I during the initscript processes - enters Interactive Boot mode, so you can Y/N individual startup scripts, including xdm/X Even easier, hit e at the GRUB menu and add gentoo=nox to the kernel options. Easier still, create a separate menu entry with this option in anticipation of such situations... especially you Dale :P -- Neil Bothwick In possession of a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:53:16 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Your post makes sense until you realise that the use of XML in a configuration designed to be changed by the user renders the package virtually unusable. Given a choice between me as a developer struggling with a config parser versus vast swathes of users dumping the package because of the same parser, I'd say it's me that has to work harder, not my users. If we are truly trying to make Linux more accessible, with things like the plug and play hal offers, should we even be contemplating editing config files? XML is a machine-readable file format that just happens to use ASCII characters, it is not meant to be modified by a text editor, so if your program uses XML configuration files, it should include a means of editing those files that does not include the use of vim. -- Neil Bothwick A great many people mistake opinions for thoughts. -- Herbert V. Prochnow signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
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. Magic SysRq falls so far short of this that it's not even worth contemplating. It's useful for mega-power users and kernel devs doing really way out things, but for normal users it might as well be invisible. Sure, it's documented in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sysrq.txt. Well now, I offer two comments: I doubt that kernel docs are even installed on most user-centric distros, and anyone want to present an argument why the location of that file and it's contents might be construed as being self-evident and/or obvious? I do remember when I was using Mandrake, the kernel sources wasn't even installed. I don't know if that option was even enabled in the kernel. With Mandrake, they just enabled modules for everything. When this happened to me, just being able to do a ctrl al backspace would have been good. I did try it but it didn't work either. That would at least be a good rescue in case of failure. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Tuesday 19 January 2010 00:29:18 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:53:16 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Your post makes sense until you realise that the use of XML in a configuration designed to be changed by the user renders the package virtually unusable. Given a choice between me as a developer struggling with a config parser versus vast swathes of users dumping the package because of the same parser, I'd say it's me that has to work harder, not my users. If we are truly trying to make Linux more accessible, with things like the plug and play hal offers, should we even be contemplating editing config files? XML is a machine-readable file format that just happens to use ASCII characters, it is not meant to be modified by a text editor, so if your program uses XML configuration files, it should include a means of editing those files that does not include the use of vim. which almost by definition means you need an xml-information parser on par with an xml-parser to figure out what the hell the fields mean, then design an intelligent viewer-editor thingy that lets the user add-delete-change the information in the xml file. All the while displaying to the user at least some information about the fields in view. Shaes of .chm anyone? By the time you've done all that and made the thing semi-usable, you've expended more effort than if you had written you own xml-parser from scratch. In C, python and perl. Plus C++ for good measure just to show how clever you are. As said before by someone else, hal and everything about it is a classic case of second system syndrome. It should be a comp-sci object case :-) -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
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. -- Iain Buchanan iaindb at netspace dot net dot au It's more than magnificent-it's mediocre. -Samuel Goldwyn
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Neil Bothwick wrote: On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:04:56 -0800, James Ausmus wrote: Another option (I know - too late for you, but might be useful for someone that runs across this on Google), is to press I during the initscript processes - enters Interactive Boot mode, so you can Y/N individual startup scripts, including xdm/X Even easier, hit e at the GRUB menu and add gentoo=nox to the kernel options. Easier still, create a separate menu entry with this option in anticipation of such situations... especially you Dale :P I just edit the grub line on mine. Heck, no more than I reboot, not having one would be OK. r...@smoker / # uptime 18:20:00 up 24 days, 22:12, 1 user, load average: 1.51, 1.37, 1.25 r...@smoker / # I usually just do softlevel=single or that other one I got wrote down here somewhere. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
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, 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? Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:09:16 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: XML is a machine-readable file format that just happens to use ASCII characters, it is not meant to be modified by a text editor, so if your program uses XML configuration files, it should include a means of editing those files that does not include the use of vim. which almost by definition means you need an xml-information parser on par with an xml-parser to figure out what the hell the fields mean, then design an intelligent viewer-editor thingy that lets the user add-delete-change the information in the xml file. All the while displaying to the user at least some information about the fields in view. Or a pretty GUI with clicky boxes to change the settings while never letting the user see the contents of the XML. -- Neil Bothwick We are phasing in a paperless office, starting with the restrooms. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Alan McKinnon wrote: On Tuesday 19 January 2010 00:29:18 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:53:16 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Your post makes sense until you realise that the use of XML in a configuration designed to be changed by the user renders the package virtually unusable. Given a choice between me as a developer struggling with a config parser versus vast swathes of users dumping the package because of the same parser, I'd say it's me that has to work harder, not my users. If we are truly trying to make Linux more accessible, with things like the plug and play hal offers, should we even be contemplating editing config files? XML is a machine-readable file format that just happens to use ASCII characters, it is not meant to be modified by a text editor, so if your program uses XML configuration files, it should include a means of editing those files that does not include the use of vim. which almost by definition means you need an xml-information parser on par with an xml-parser to figure out what the hell the fields mean, then design an intelligent viewer-editor thingy that lets the user add-delete-change the information in the xml file. All the while displaying to the user at least some information about the fields in view. Shaes of .chm anyone? By the time you've done all that and made the thing semi-usable, you've expended more effort than if you had written you own xml-parser from scratch. In C, python and perl. Plus C++ for good measure just to show how clever you are. As said before by someone else, hal and everything about it is a classic case of second system syndrome. It should be a comp-sci object case :-) I bet if hal had a easier to alter config file, I could have gotten my keyboard and mouse to work. Having the config file in xml format would be fine, IF it works out of the box with no configuring at all. Thing is, in my case and a few others, it needed a little bit of help to work. Some figured out how to make it work but my light bulb burned out and we all know where that ended up. I suspect that the underlying part of hal works fine. It MAY have worked fine for me if it was configured properly. The config part seems to have been at least some of its shortcoming. Take hal, redo the config file and try again. May work. ;-) Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: On Tuesday 19 January 2010 00:29:18 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:53:16 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Your post makes sense until you realise that the use of XML in a configuration designed to be changed by the user renders the package virtually unusable. Given a choice between me as a developer struggling with a config parser versus vast swathes of users dumping the package because of the same parser, I'd say it's me that has to work harder, not my users. If we are truly trying to make Linux more accessible, with things like the plug and play hal offers, should we even be contemplating editing config files? XML is a machine-readable file format that just happens to use ASCII characters, it is not meant to be modified by a text editor, so if your program uses XML configuration files, it should include a means of editing those files that does not include the use of vim. which almost by definition means you need an xml-information parser on par with an xml-parser to figure out what the hell the fields mean, then design an intelligent viewer-editor thingy that lets the user add-delete-change the information in the xml file. All the while displaying to the user at least some information about the fields in view. Shaes of .chm anyone? By the time you've done all that and made the thing semi-usable, you've expended more effort than if you had written you own xml-parser from scratch. In C, python and perl. Plus C++ for good measure just to show how clever you are. As said before by someone else, hal and everything about it is a classic case of second system syndrome. It should be a comp-sci object case :-) I bet if hal had a easier to alter config file, I could have gotten my keyboard and mouse to work. Having the config file in xml format would be fine, IF it works out of the box with no configuring at all. Thing is, in my case and a few others, it needed a little bit of help to work. Some figured out how to make it work but my light bulb burned out and we all know where that ended up. I suspect that the underlying part of hal works fine. It MAY have worked fine for me if it was configured properly. The config part seems to have been at least some of its shortcoming. Take hal, redo the config file and try again. May work. ;-) Or, at least provide a easy config UI (both X and non-X) for the XML files, so you never have to worry about the syntax or the complexity of the config files... -James Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
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
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On 18 Jan 2010, at 21:50, James Ausmus wrote: Very recent buyers of Lenovo laptops don't even *have* a SysRq key anymore. I reckon it won't be long before other makers follow suit. I can see Lenovo's point: there's probably less than 10,000 people in the whole world that ever used that key in the last 12 months and all of them are very au fait with Linux Yuck - really? Not even as an unlabeled Alt function of a Print Screen button? Sounds like a new kernel patch needs to be introduced, which allows you to select an alternative to the SysRq key for the magic commands... sigh Stupid HW manufacturers... To me, this sounds like rationalisation - in the make more efficient by reorganizing it in such a way as to dispense with unnecessary personnel or equipment sense - on behalf of hardware manufacturers. I would hate to do away with the numeric keypad myself, but at the same time I have to question how often I use it. When I look at the whole keyboard it seems crazy to have 102 or 105 keys in order to type 26 letters, 10 numbers and some punctuation. The function keys of regular keyboards are never used by the majority of people, and it has been this way for over a decade. Yet new keyboards require them because IBM keyboards had them in the 1980s. The authors of window managers map the close window shortcut to alt- F4 because the F4 key is there and is sure to be unused by anything else, but this function could easily be moved elsewhere if we got rid of the extra keyboard clutter. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On 18 Jan 2010, at 17:53, Alan McKinnon wrote: ... XML allows you to generate complex, structured, hierarchical data that can be read, changed, and stored by well-tested third party libraries that don't need to know anything about the contents or meaning of your configuration data beforehand. This means I, as a developer, don't need to write any code to read and parse configurations, validate the syntax or structure (only the content), or persist it back out. In simpler terms: less time spent on the configuration parser, more time spent being productive. ... Your post makes sense until you realise that the use of XML in a configuration designed to be changed by the user renders the package virtually unusable. Given a choice between me as a developer struggling with a config parser versus vast swathes of users dumping the package because of the same parser, I'd say it's me that has to work harder, not my users. It pains me to be making another I use a Mac post here today, but since I do so, I don't really see the pain. I double click on an XML configuration file, and a GUI editor opens, a program designed specifically for editing such files. I can create new entries, child-objects of a configuration option, or I can just double- click on the entry's value and change it. Strings, numbers booleans are clearly marked, so that I can't break my configuration file by entering the wrong kind of data for a value. Of course, I use Gentoo on my headless servers, so I am glad that server software - Dovecot or Courier for IMAP, Apache, Samba - all have plain-text configuration files I can edit with vim (which I have been learning to utilise better recently). But even if these switched to XML, a curses XML editor could easily be written. As a novice programmer myself I was extremely glad to discover the Getopt::Long (and similar) modules when learning Perl recently. I have long written my scripts in Bash and parsed command-line parameters myself, with $1 and shift and whatnot, and I'm sure I've created some monstrosities with which it's easy for the user to foul things up just by entering parameters in an unexpected order. So I'd be very glad to hand off config script parsing to someone else - I write my software for myself, so I'm not sure I care how this affects users ;). Having said that, I'm a little surprised by Mike's assertion that there's no libraries for parsing text configuration files that are comparable with those for parsing XML. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On 18 Jan 2010, at 23:09, Alan McKinnon wrote: ... If we are truly trying to make Linux more accessible, with things like the plug and play hal offers, should we even be contemplating editing config files? XML is a machine-readable file format that just happens to use ASCII characters, it is not meant to be modified by a text editor, so if your program uses XML configuration files, it should include a means of editing those files that does not include the use of vim. which almost by definition means you need an xml-information parser on par with an xml-parser to figure out what the hell the fields mean, then design an intelligent viewer-editor thingy that lets the user add-delete- change the information in the xml file. All the while displaying to the user at least some information about the fields in view. Shaes of .chm anyone? By the time you've done all that and made the thing semi-usable, you've expended more effort than if you had written you own xml-parser from scratch. This doesn't address Neil's suggestion that we *never* edit config files, but assuming programmers are going to continue using XML for this purpose, a dedicated XML editor will surely become a standard on all distros. When editing XML files one shouldn't need to be careful of the angle- brackets or the slashes - as one would be editing the file in a text editor like vim or nano - because the XML editor should take care of all that and hide it from the user (on the rare occasions upon which a user does actually need to edit the config). If a good XML editor - which treats all XML config files in a standard manner - is available then I see no problem with programmers utilising XML. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Alan McKinnon wrote: As our resident hal-hater-in-charge, Dale will no doubt be *very* pleased to hear of what Ubuntu is doing for 10.04: entirely removing hal in favour of DeviceKit. When I say *entirely*, that's what the blog said - entirely. If this pans out, maybe there's a chance Dale can get a working (recent!) X at long last :-) YEPPIE Although I must say that my X works just fine without hal. It just doesn't work WITH hal. From my understanding, isn't the same guy doing devicekit that did hal? I'm not saying it won't be better because it should be. From what I read a good while back, he learned a lot about the pitfalls of hal. He, most likely, will know best how to do it differently this time. I think hal was well intentioned but somewhere it just got lost and got real geeky. I never did figure out the config files. They may as well have been in Greek or something. I'm hoping devicekit will be easier to config if not automagically configuring itself, sort of like udev. For me, udev just seemed to work. Let's all cross our fingers. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 09:39:27AM -0600, Dale wrote: From my understanding, isn't the same guy doing devicekit that did hal? I'm not saying it won't be better because it should be. From what I read a good while back, he learned a lot about the pitfalls of hal. He, most likely, will know best how to do it differently this time. It is usually done right in the third version. First one too small, second one too big, third one just right :) I think it is called Second System Effect I guess we will see if it is. -- Eray
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Sun, 2010-01-17 at 17:27 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: As our resident hal-hater-in-charge, Dale will no doubt be *very* pleased to hear of what Ubuntu is doing for 10.04: entirely removing hal in favour of DeviceKit. When I say *entirely*, that's what the blog said - entirely. If this pans out, maybe there's a chance Dale can get a working (recent!) X at long last Yeah, this has been the plan all along. Hal was going to be the the way to go until something better came along. Whether DeviceKit (or whatever they're calling it now) is the better replacement has yet to be seen.
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Sunday 17 January 2010 18:18:36 Eray Aslan wrote: On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 09:39:27AM -0600, Dale wrote: From my understanding, isn't the same guy doing devicekit that did hal? I'm not saying it won't be better because it should be. From what I read a good while back, he learned a lot about the pitfalls of hal. He, most likely, will know best how to do it differently this time. It is usually done right in the third version. First one too small, second one too big, third one just right :) I think it is called Second System Effect Spot on :-) As documented by Fredrick P. Brooks in his seminal collection of essays The Mythical Man Month. Published over 40 years ago, and still as true today as it was then :-) I guess we will see if it is. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: As our resident hal-hater-in-charge, Dale will no doubt be *very* pleased to hear of what Ubuntu is doing for 10.04: entirely removing hal in favour of DeviceKit. It seems that DeviceKit is no help for the various bugs in hald that prevent writng CDs/DVDs/BluRays under certain circumstances. I did write mail to the DeviceKit maintainer to no avail, how do we prevent that DeviceKit will become the same desaster as hald? Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de(uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Eray Aslan wrote: It is usually done right in the third version. First one too small, second one too big, third one just right :) I think it is called Second System Effect No, it's called Goldilocks and the Three Bears. ;) Be lucky, Neil http://www.neiljw.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Alan McKinnon wrote: entirely removing hal in favour of DeviceKit. Xorg is removing HAL support; as of xorg-server-1.8 HAL is no longer used. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=Nzc2Mw Devicekit will not replace HAL entirely: http://www.x.org/wiki/XorgHAL Btw, devicekit has been renamed to udisks. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=Nzc2NA Best regards Peter K, lurking HAL-hater...
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Joerg Schilling wrote: how do we prevent that DeviceKit will become the same desaster as hald? The only way to be sure of that is to write your own replacement for HAL. ;) Be lucky, Neil http://www.neiljw.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On 17 Jan 2010, at 18:42, Joerg Schilling wrote: Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: As our resident hal-hater-in-charge, Dale will no doubt be *very* pleased to hear of what Ubuntu is doing for 10.04: entirely removing hal in favour of DeviceKit. It seems that DeviceKit is no help for the various bugs in hald that prevent writng CDs/DVDs/BluRays under certain circumstances. I did write mail to the DeviceKit maintainer to no avail, ... You probably didn't bitch him out thoroughly enough, Joerg. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
Stroller strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk wrote: It seems that DeviceKit is no help for the various bugs in hald that prevent writng CDs/DVDs/BluRays under certain circumstances. I did write mail to the DeviceKit maintainer to no avail, ... You probably didn't bitch him out thoroughly enough, Joerg. I did send him a description of the current problems and I did send him a list of items that need to be addressed. Sometimes people are not open for the reality because they believe that things cannot happen... and my impression (as it seems that he was also involved with hald) is that he is not interested in help - otherwise people did contact me for help before hald was created. If you like to send him a mail that uses clear text, feel free to do so ;-) I fear that we and up in something that is not better than now. Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de(uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
pk wrote: Alan McKinnon wrote: entirely removing hal in favour of DeviceKit. Xorg is removing HAL support; as of xorg-server-1.8 HAL is no longer used. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=Nzc2Mw Devicekit will not replace HAL entirely: http://www.x.org/wiki/XorgHAL Btw, devicekit has been renamed to udisks. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=Nzc2NA Best regards Peter K, lurking HAL-hater... Well can they at least settle on a name? I read something about udisks the other day but no idea it was even related to hal's replacement. I don't care what they call it as long as it works well and is easy to configure the thing. Stop lurking and just join me. lol Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale
On Sunday 17 January 2010 22:14:06 Neil Walker wrote: Joerg Schilling wrote: how do we prevent that DeviceKit will become the same desaster as hald? The only way to be sure of that is to write your own replacement for HAL. ;) That might not be a bad idea I never agreed with the implementation of hal. An abstract layer sounds good, but why must it abstract ALL hardware? Most software already knows what type of devices it is going to use, so that software should either do it's own abstraction, or a utility library should do it, but be limited to what devices it deals with. Most devices fall into one of two groups: storage and I/O. Auto-mounters do not care about your keyboard, whereas X needs to know about your monitor, card, keyboard, mouse. Why does hal try and abstract both? Seems silly to me. One could also argue that the developer's state of mind is reflected in the chosen method of configuration - xml files. This just defies all understanding. Apart from the fact that real-world xml is almost unreadable, the conditions that make xml useful are simply not present in hal... xml works well when you have system A talking to system B and neither A nor B (nor user C) know in advance exactly what the other is. They might not even know much about the data schema being used, so that metadata is in the xml. This is so completely not the case with hal on a local machine, that it defies description why the dev thought it might be useful. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
