Re: floppy-support being retired (was: Retiring Packages with Broken Dependencies in branched (2017-06-26))

[Till Maas]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 10:38:11AM -0500, Gwyn Ciesla wrote:

> I have a bunch of them still.  Don't ask. I'll take floppy-support if no on
> else wants it.

Actually it is not orphaned but the current maintainer did not fix the
package to exclude aarch64 as there is no floppy support there causing a
broken dep. I rebuilt the package now but it will still need a freeze
exception to be included into the F26 Everything repo.

Kind regards
Till
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Re: floppy-support being retired (was: Retiring Packages with Broken Dependencies in branched (2017-06-26))

[Gwyn Ciesla]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 10:33 AM, Adam Williamson <
adamw...@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 2017-06-28 at 11:03 +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> > t...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
> > > floppy-support bruno  162
> weeks ago
> >
> > So are floppies now definitely a thing of the past according to Fedora?
>
> If you want them not to be...you can take over the package. We are all
> Fedora. ;) It contains exactly one text file, so maintaining it is
> presumably not the toughest job in the world.
>
> (I saw a pack of floppies for sale in a dollar store the other day,
> made me do a double take...)
> --
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA Community Monkey
> IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
> http://www.happyassassin.net
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I have a bunch of them still.  Don't ask. I'll take floppy-support if no on
else wants it.

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in your fear, seek only love

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Re: floppy-support being retired (was: Retiring Packages with Broken Dependencies in branched (2017-06-26))

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Adam Williamson  said:
> (I saw a pack of floppies for sale in a dollar store the other day,
> made me do a double take...)

I still own the ufiformat package in Fedora (for formatting disks in USB
floppy drives).  I haven't actually used it in quite a while, but I did
run across my USB floppy drive recently...

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Re: floppy-support being retired (was: Retiring Packages with Broken Dependencies in branched (2017-06-26))

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2017-06-28 at 11:03 +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> t...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
> > floppy-support bruno  162 weeks ago 
> 
> So are floppies now definitely a thing of the past according to Fedora?

If you want them not to be...you can take over the package. We are all
Fedora. ;) It contains exactly one text file, so maintaining it is
presumably not the toughest job in the world.

(I saw a pack of floppies for sale in a dollar store the other day,
made me do a double take...)
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Re: floppy-support being retired (was: Retiring Packages with Broken Dependencies in branched (2017-06-26))

[Peter Robinson]

>> On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 10:03 AM, Björn Persson  wrote:
>>> t...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
 floppy-support bruno  162 weeks ago
>>>
>>> So are floppies now definitely a thing of the past according to Fedora?
>>
>> Well they definitely are a thing of the past, there's no doubt there,
>> the question is whether they are still used :-) I would argue printers
>> are a thing of the past but sadly there's no such thing as a paperless
>> office yet.
>
> How hard do we want to make things with people with legacy technology? While 
> they may not be actively used, they do still exist.

Sure, so do paper tape and punch cards there's a number of issues
but primarily people interested in the technology both maintaining it
and actually testing it to ensure it works. For example we've had a
kernel patch since 2010 that disables the auto loading of the floppy
kernel module so people would have to know manually load it. All this
package does is to actually enable the auto loading of that module so
it works OOTB for those that know to install the package.

Peter
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Re: floppy-support being retired (was: Retiring Packages with Broken Dependencies in branched (2017-06-26))

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 11:03:09AM +0200, Björn Persson wrote:
> t...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
> > floppy-support bruno  162 weeks ago 
> 
> So are floppies now definitely a thing of the past according to Fedora?

This message is simply Fedora is saying that the package is being retired
because it has broken dependencies, which the maintainer has not fixed in
a timely manner. Perhaps the maintainer doesn't care about the package any
more, or doesn't have time for it, or any number of other reasons. That's
just one maintainer though. If someone else cares about this package,
they could volunteer to become maintainer, and fix the package, at which
point there is no requirement for it to be retired.

Now if the kernel's 'floppy' module is removed from the build, that would
be an explicit statement that floppies are no longer supported, but AFAIK,
all we've done in the kernel is turn off auto-loading of 'floppy' - it can
still be loaded explicitly.

Regards,
Daniel
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Re: floppy-support being retired (was: Retiring Packages with Broken Dependencies in branched (2017-06-26))

[Graham Leggett]

On 28 Jun 2017, at 11:09 AM, Peter Robinson  wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 10:03 AM, Björn Persson  wrote:
>> t...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
>>> floppy-support bruno  162 weeks ago
>> 
>> So are floppies now definitely a thing of the past according to Fedora?
> 
> Well they definitely are a thing of the past, there's no doubt there,
> the question is whether they are still used :-) I would argue printers
> are a thing of the past but sadly there's no such thing as a paperless
> office yet.

How hard do we want to make things with people with legacy technology? While 
they may not be actively used, they do still exist.

Regards,
Graham
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Re: floppy-support being retired (was: Retiring Packages with Broken Dependencies in branched (2017-06-26))

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 10:03 AM, Björn Persson  wrote:
> t...@fedoraproject.org wrote:
>> floppy-support bruno  162 weeks ago
>
> So are floppies now definitely a thing of the past according to Fedora?

Well they definitely are a thing of the past, there's no doubt there,
the question is whether they are still used :-) I would argue printers
are a thing of the past but sadly there's no such thing as a paperless
office yet.

> (A power supply that I recently bought came with an adapter cable for
> powering a diskette drive. :-) )

They can be used for powering other things though too.
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Re: floppy support

[Bruno Wolff III]

I have submitted a review request for floppy-support:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=735554
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Re: floppy support

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 22:41:45 -0500,
  Bruno Wolff III br...@wolff.to wrote:
 Below is a proposed specfile for the floppy case. (Analog joystick would be
 very similar.) I haven't tested the package for functionality yet, but did
 test it with rpmbuild and rpmlint. Is this what we want? Is this ready
 for a formal review?

I tested this out and it seems to load the floppy module on install and
on boot. It does not trigger creating the /dev/floppy sym link and I am
not sure if anything affecting how the desktop treats floppies should
also be included. (I would think checking for inserted floppies would
be annoying in general and shouldn't be the default, but maybe there should
be something done to make them mountable by users by default.)

While it is possible to expand the scope a bit later (e.g. include a udev
rule in addition), I figured I'd check now to see if anyone had any suggestions
about additions before I submit it for review.
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Re: floppy support

[Tomas Mraz]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 17:11 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: 
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:49:37AM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
  Matthew Garrett (mj...@srcf.ucam.org) said: 
   On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 02:50:10PM +0100, Tom Hughes wrote:
Or modules-load.d if you want to force load a module.
   
   Oops. Yes, that's what I meant.
  
  Is there a reason that (at least for the one case) this wouldn't just
  go in the joystick package?
 
 Joystick seems to be part of the default install (it handles USB devices 
 as well as legacy ones), and we probably wouldn't want this by default.
Yes, but it could be a subpackage of it. No need to create new source
package for just this simple configuration file.

Tomáš Mráz

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Re: floppy support

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 08/30/2011 10:22 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
 Once upon a time, Simo Sorces...@redhat.com  said:
 They do not 'hang', they just take longer to boot, sometimes a lot
 longer.

 How much longer?

Much much longer, when I was still on the anaconda team we had
numerous bug reports about this (esp during RHEL-6 testing), in many
cases people filed bugs with a description along the lines of:
Installation DVD does not boot, because it took so long they thought
the install was just hanging forever.

 How many such machines?

I've no hard numbers but enough to generate numerous bug reports
during the non public testing phase of RHEL-6 alone.

Also see:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=565693
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=587909
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=682426

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/kernel/2010-April/002394.html
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/kernel/2010-April/002420.html

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Technical_Notes/index.html
And search for IBM ThinkPad T43 notebook

Note this is in no way an exhaustive list of all bugs about this,
just something a really really quick search turned up.

 Again, I've booted systems
 without floppy drives but with floppy support loaded, and I haven't seen
 any significant hang.

Yes the hang is not guaranteed to be there, or to take very long,
but often it is there, and sometimes it takes very long (which is
the real problematic case). If you're really interested in seeing this fixed
go talk to the kernel guys:

anaconda loads the floppy driver by default when booting of the install
DVD, because of driverdisk support, thus the anaconda team has been getting
its share of bug reports wrt this. But AFAIK there are no such issues
in RHEL-5, where we auto-load the floppy driver too, so something
has changed in the kernel causing the hang when no drive is attached to the
controller. I could swear I filed a bug against the kernel about this
regression, but I cannot find it.

 Leaving known-working hardware unusable at install is just rude and
 irritating when it is needed.  There should be good justification, not
 just a bunch of developers don't use it anymore, so we don't think
 anybody else needs it.

Is it delays bootup by up to 10-30 minutes on various modern systems
a good enough justification?

Regards,

Hans
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Re: floppy support

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 08/31/2011 05:41 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
 Below is a proposed specfile for the floppy case. (Analog joystick would be
 very similar.) I haven't tested the package for functionality yet, but did
 test it with rpmbuild and rpmlint. Is this what we want?

I don't know about others, but I love it. Actually a constructive solution
to the problem being discussed, we could even put it in comps (as not enabled
by default) :)

 Is this ready
 for a formal review?

Putting it up for formal review gets my vote, but first lets see what other 
think
for a bit.

As always many thanks for you excellent and constructive work on Fedora.

Regards,

Hans





 Name: floppy-support
 Version:1.0
 Release:1%{?dist}
 Summary:Load floppy driver at boot time
 Group: System Environment/Kernel


 License:MIT
 # The package is built just using this specfile.
 #URL:
 #Source0:

 Requires(post): module-init-tools

 BuildArch:  noarch

 %description
 By default the floppy driver is not loaded at boot time. Installing this
 package will load the floppy driver as part of the install and will set
 things so that it will be loaded during future boots.


 %prep
 #No setup, since no source outside the specfile.



 %install
 rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
 mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/modules-load.d
 echo floppy  $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/modules-load.d/floppy.conf


 %files
 %{_libdir}/modules-load.d/floppy.conf

 %post
 /sbin/modprobe floppy

 %changelog
 * Tue Aug 30 2011 Bruno Wolff IIIbr...@wolff.to  1.0-1
 - Initial package creation
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Re: floppy support

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:41:45PM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
 %install
 rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
 mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/modules-load.d
 echo floppy  $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/modules-load.d/floppy.conf

%{_sysconfdir} instead of %{_libdir} everywhere.

 %files
 %{_libdir}/modules-load.d/floppy.conf

Jakub
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Re: floppy support

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 11:58:41 +0200,
  Jakub Jelinek ja...@redhat.com wrote:
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:41:45PM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
  %install
  rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
  mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/modules-load.d
  echo floppy  $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/modules-load.d/floppy.conf
 
 %{_sysconfdir} instead of %{_libdir} everywhere.
 
  %files
  %{_libdir}/modules-load.d/floppy.conf

I am willing to do that, but before going there I want to not this passage
from the modules-load.d man page:
Packages
should install their configuration files in /usr/lib/, files in /etc/
are reserved for the local administration, which possibly decides to
overwrite the configurations installed from packages.
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Re: floppy support

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Hans de Goede hdego...@redhat.com said:
 anaconda loads the floppy driver by default when booting of the install
 DVD, because of driverdisk support, thus the anaconda team has been getting
 its share of bug reports wrt this. But AFAIK there are no such issues
 in RHEL-5, where we auto-load the floppy driver too, so something
 has changed in the kernel causing the hang when no drive is attached to the
 controller. I could swear I filed a bug against the kernel about this
 regression, but I cannot find it.

So, it sounds like it is a kernel bug, and the fix was to just ignore
it and stop loading the module.  sigh...
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Re: floppy support

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Bruno Wolff III br...@wolff.to said:
 Below is a proposed specfile for the floppy case. (Analog joystick would be
 very similar.) I haven't tested the package for functionality yet, but did
 test it with rpmbuild and rpmlint. Is this what we want? Is this ready
 for a formal review?

That loads the module, but what about configuring device access for
desktop users?  That's the more irritating part to me (that has changed
over time and I no longer know how to fix it).  Once loaded, the floppy
device should be treated just like any other removable media device as
far as user access is concerned.

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Re: floppy support

[Felix Miata]

On 2011/08/30 15:06 (GMT+1000) Chris Jones composed:

 I can't see any reason for floppies these days considering their extreme
 price per data unit as opposed to usb memory.

For some people the price of floppies is a sunk cost, or was never a cost at 
all (e.g. me, who has over a hundred empty ones acquired 5, 10 or 20 years 
ago, some at 0 price).

Unlike USB chips in most budgets, each floppy is cheap enough to be 
disposable after one use or dedicated to one small file.

Floppies have enough room on them to write down something legible about their 
content (e.g. DOS boot with FDISK; Memtest86+ v.whatever; BIOS flash for xyz 
brand AMI BIOS; etc.) which won't interfere with insertion or removal from 
its reader.

Floppies are large enough to be much less likely than a USB stick to get lost 
between couch cushions or fit through a pocket hole.

Not everyone uses hardware with installed and functional OM, bootable USB or 
PXE.

A rude installer might unset a bootable flag or fail to install boot code in 
the MBR of the only available internal storage, leaving the primary boot 
device unbootable, and a floppy the only available device to boot from 
without opening up the machine, if opening up is even any option at all.

IOW, poor as they are, floppies still have both advantages and uses.
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Re: floppy support

[drago01]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Felix Miata mrma...@earthlink.net wrote:
 On 2011/08/30 15:06 (GMT+1000) Chris Jones composed:

 I can't see any reason for floppies these days considering their extreme
 price per data unit as opposed to usb memory.

 For some people the price of floppies is a sunk cost, or was never a cost at
 all (e.g. me, who has over a hundred empty ones acquired 5, 10 or 20 years
 ago, some at 0 price).

 Unlike USB chips in most budgets, each floppy is cheap enough to be
 disposable after one use or dedicated to one small file.

 Floppies have enough room on them to write down something legible about their
 content (e.g. DOS boot with FDISK; Memtest86+ v.whatever; BIOS flash for xyz
 brand AMI BIOS; etc.) which won't interfere with insertion or removal from
 its reader.

 Floppies are large enough to be much less likely than a USB stick to get lost
 between couch cushions or fit through a pocket hole.

 Not everyone uses hardware with installed and functional OM, bootable USB or 
 PXE.

 A rude installer might unset a bootable flag or fail to install boot code in
 the MBR of the only available internal storage, leaving the primary boot
 device unbootable, and a floppy the only available device to boot from
 without opening up the machine, if opening up is even any option at all.

CD/DVD ?
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Re: floppy support

[Nils Philippsen]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 08:40 +0200, drago01 wrote:
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 8:36 AM, Felix Miata mrma...@earthlink.net wrote:
  On 2011/08/30 15:06 (GMT+1000) Chris Jones composed:
 
  I can't see any reason for floppies these days considering their extreme
  price per data unit as opposed to usb memory.
 
  For some people the price of floppies is a sunk cost, or was never a cost at
  all (e.g. me, who has over a hundred empty ones acquired 5, 10 or 20 years
  ago, some at 0 price).
 
  Unlike USB chips in most budgets, each floppy is cheap enough to be
  disposable after one use or dedicated to one small file.
 
  Floppies have enough room on them to write down something legible about 
  their
  content (e.g. DOS boot with FDISK; Memtest86+ v.whatever; BIOS flash for xyz
  brand AMI BIOS; etc.) which won't interfere with insertion or removal from
  its reader.
 
  Floppies are large enough to be much less likely than a USB stick to get 
  lost
  between couch cushions or fit through a pocket hole.
 
  Not everyone uses hardware with installed and functional OM, bootable USB 
  or PXE.
 
  A rude installer might unset a bootable flag or fail to install boot code in
  the MBR of the only available internal storage, leaving the primary boot
  device unbootable, and a floppy the only available device to boot from
  without opening up the machine, if opening up is even any option at all.
 
 CD/DVD ?

Write Once Read Many? Wait... Write Once Read Once in this case. Not
cheap enough for that.

Nils
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 03:33:04 +0200,
  Kevin Kofler kevin.kof...@chello.at wrote:
 
 No, it means that (unless this was recently fixed) you have to modprobe it 
 manually (e.g. from rc.local) because nothing bothers trying to modprobe it 
 for you anymore. IMHO, this is really broken, but the bug reports about it 
 were ignored or declared NOTABUG.

There was significant discussion about this issue on the mailing lists
and Kyle thought he had a good solution to having the floppy drive
recognized when it was there and not adding long delays to the boot up
for people with incorrectly configured (your supposed to disable the floppy
drive in the bios when you don't have one) or broken bios. I am not sure
what happened with the implementation of the solution.

 
 Similarily, analog joystick support (yes, those joysticks you plug on the 
 MIDI ports of those old sound cards) also has to be modprobed manually.

I also have a gamepad which is like a joystick and need to do
modprobe analog to get it recognized.
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 06:50:11AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 03:33:04 +0200,
   Kevin Kofler kevin.kof...@chello.at wrote:
  
  No, it means that (unless this was recently fixed) you have to modprobe it 
  manually (e.g. from rc.local) because nothing bothers trying to modprobe it 
  for you anymore. IMHO, this is really broken, but the bug reports about it 
  were ignored or declared NOTABUG.
 
 There was significant discussion about this issue on the mailing lists
 and Kyle thought he had a good solution to having the floppy drive
 recognized when it was there and not adding long delays to the boot up
 for people with incorrectly configured (your supposed to disable the floppy
 drive in the bios when you don't have one) or broken bios. I am not sure
 what happened with the implementation of the solution.

ACPI turned out to be full of lies. The real problem is that machines 
will report a floppy controller even if they have no floppy drives 
attached, and the ACPI function that's supposed to return a list of 
drives usually returns a mixture of falsehoods and untruths. Merely 
havig a floppy controller is enough to get the floppy driver loaded, 
which then hangs for ages looking for a drive.

The easiest solution would be to fix the floppy driver to probe in the 
background but I suspect most people would prefer to empty biohazard 
containers full of used needles by hand than touch floppy.c.

  
  Similarily, analog joystick support (yes, those joysticks you plug on the 
  MIDI ports of those old sound cards) also has to be modprobed manually.
 
 I also have a gamepad which is like a joystick and need to do
 modprobe analog to get it recognized.

There's no way to get any feedback from the gameport driver as to (a) 
whether there's anything plugged in, or (b) what is plugged in. We could 
have the gameport driver automatically pull in analog but that'd 
probably break people doing midi or using some more specialised input 
device. It's a hard problem that only impacts a pretty tiny set of 
people, so it's prioritised somewhere below the hard problems that 
impact a pretty large set of people.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 13:41:57 +0100,
  Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
 
 ACPI turned out to be full of lies. The real problem is that machines 
 will report a floppy controller even if they have no floppy drives 
 attached, and the ACPI function that's supposed to return a list of 
 drives usually returns a mixture of falsehoods and untruths. Merely 
 havig a floppy controller is enough to get the floppy driver loaded, 
 which then hangs for ages looking for a drive.

Thanks for the explanation.

 There's no way to get any feedback from the gameport driver as to (a) 
 whether there's anything plugged in, or (b) what is plugged in. We could 
 have the gameport driver automatically pull in analog but that'd 
 probably break people doing midi or using some more specialised input 
 device. It's a hard problem that only impacts a pretty tiny set of 
 people, so it's prioritised somewhere below the hard problems that 
 impact a pretty large set of people.

Again thanks for the explanation. I had figured gameports might be hard
to detect so I wasn't too worried about this. I did want to mention
what you needed to include on the modprobe command to get the the driver
loaded in case someone wandered accross the thread later.
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Re: floppy support

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Michael Cronenworth m...@cchtml.com said:
 On 08/29/2011 10:22 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
  It is very irritating, since I only use floppies when I really need to,
 
 Is this due to the need to boot into DOS to run a firmware utility or 
 something similar? If so, you can create a bootable, DOS USB flash 
 drive. I haven't had a need for a floppy disk in years.

That's nice that you haven't needed one, but I have.  I try all kinds of
alternatives first (up to PXE booting syslinux to load memdisk and a
floppy image), but I have run into things that just really need an
actual floppy.

It isn't why I use floppies under Linux, but my mother's very expensive
computerized embroidery machine uses floppies to transfer patterns.
There are still things in the real world that exclusively use floppy
disks, and they aren't going away as rapidly as some seem to think.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Tomas Mraz]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 13:41 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: 
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 06:50:11AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
  On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 03:33:04 +0200,
Kevin Kofler kevin.kof...@chello.at wrote:
   
   No, it means that (unless this was recently fixed) you have to modprobe 
   it 
   manually (e.g. from rc.local) because nothing bothers trying to modprobe 
   it 
   for you anymore. IMHO, this is really broken, but the bug reports about 
   it 
   were ignored or declared NOTABUG.
  
  There was significant discussion about this issue on the mailing lists
  and Kyle thought he had a good solution to having the floppy drive
  recognized when it was there and not adding long delays to the boot up
  for people with incorrectly configured (your supposed to disable the floppy
  drive in the bios when you don't have one) or broken bios. I am not sure
  what happened with the implementation of the solution.
 
 ACPI turned out to be full of lies. The real problem is that machines 
 will report a floppy controller even if they have no floppy drives 
 attached, and the ACPI function that's supposed to return a list of 
 drives usually returns a mixture of falsehoods and untruths. Merely 
 havig a floppy controller is enough to get the floppy driver loaded, 
 which then hangs for ages looking for a drive.

That seems like a clear opportunity to add a simple configure legacy
hardware button to anaconda, that would do the modprobe floppy/gameport
etc. stuff so it is loaded. Perhaps there could be switches: I have
these legacy hardware:
Floppy disk
Analog joystick
 whatever


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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 03:20:22PM +0200, Tomas Mraz wrote:
 On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 13:41 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: 
  ACPI turned out to be full of lies. The real problem is that machines 
  will report a floppy controller even if they have no floppy drives 
  attached, and the ACPI function that's supposed to return a list of 
  drives usually returns a mixture of falsehoods and untruths. Merely 
  havig a floppy controller is enough to get the floppy driver loaded, 
  which then hangs for ages looking for a drive.
 
 That seems like a clear opportunity to add a simple configure legacy
 hardware button to anaconda, that would do the modprobe floppy/gameport
 etc. stuff so it is loaded. Perhaps there could be switches: I have
 these legacy hardware:
 Floppy disk
 Analog joystick
  whatever

Or just add floppy-support and analog-joystick-support packages that 
include appropriate modprobe.conf fragments, and have documentation that 
instructs the user to install them.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:26:39 +0100,
  Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
 
 Or just add floppy-support and analog-joystick-support packages that 
 include appropriate modprobe.conf fragments, and have documentation that 
 instructs the user to install them.

To make this more precise, woulf the appropriate way to do this would be to
perhaps put floppy.conf or joystick.conf in /etc/modprode.d?
With a post install script to run modprobe manually?

Are pretty much all joysticks handled by analog or is that situation more
complicated?
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 08:09:51AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:26:39 +0100,
   Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
  
  Or just add floppy-support and analog-joystick-support packages that 
  include appropriate modprobe.conf fragments, and have documentation that 
  instructs the user to install them.
 
 To make this more precise, woulf the appropriate way to do this would be to
 perhaps put floppy.conf or joystick.conf in /etc/modprode.d?
 With a post install script to run modprobe manually?

That seems like it'd work.

 Are pretty much all joysticks handled by analog or is that situation more
 complicated?

Most are. There are some devices that need their own drivers, and as far 
as I know there's no defined PNP protocol for joysticks.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:37:16 +0100,
  Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 08:09:51AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
  On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:26:39 +0100,
Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
   
   Or just add floppy-support and analog-joystick-support packages that 
   include appropriate modprobe.conf fragments, and have documentation that 
   instructs the user to install them.
  
  To make this more precise, woulf the appropriate way to do this would be to
  perhaps put floppy.conf or joystick.conf in /etc/modprode.d?
  With a post install script to run modprobe manually?
 
 That seems like it'd work.

I'll need to test it. Right now I use explicit modprobe commands in
rc.local, which isn't good for packages. I looked at modprobe.conf
documentation and it doesn't seem like it uses those files to determine
what to load, only what to do if it is loaded. So it may be that udev
is really the correct place to do things.

I'll investigate that. Once I know the right thing to do, the packaging
should be pretty easy.
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Re: floppy support

[Michael Cronenworth]

On 08/30/2011 08:02 AM, Chris Adams wrote:
 There are still things in the real world that exclusively use floppy
 disks, and they aren't going away as rapidly as some seem to think.

No need to tell me. I work everyday with SCO Unix machines that have no 
idea what a USB device is. I've just found alternatives.
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Re: floppy support

[Tom Hughes]

On 30/08/11 14:23, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

 I'll need to test it. Right now I use explicit modprobe commands in
 rc.local, which isn't good for packages. I looked at modprobe.conf
 documentation and it doesn't seem like it uses those files to determine
 what to load, only what to do if it is loaded. So it may be that udev
 is really the correct place to do things.

Or modules-load.d if you want to force load a module.

tom

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Re: floppy support

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 02:50:10PM +0100, Tom Hughes wrote:
 On 30/08/11 14:23, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
 
 I'll need to test it. Right now I use explicit modprobe commands in
 rc.local, which isn't good for packages. I looked at modprobe.conf
 documentation and it doesn't seem like it uses those files to determine
 what to load, only what to do if it is loaded. So it may be that udev
 is really the correct place to do things.
 
 Or modules-load.d if you want to force load a module.

Oops. Yes, that's what I meant.

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Re: floppy support

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:50:10 +0100,
  Tom Hughes t...@compton.nu wrote:
 On 30/08/11 14:23, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
 
  I'll need to test it. Right now I use explicit modprobe commands in
  rc.local, which isn't good for packages. I looked at modprobe.conf
  documentation and it doesn't seem like it uses those files to determine
  what to load, only what to do if it is loaded. So it may be that udev
  is really the correct place to do things.
 
 Or modules-load.d if you want to force load a module.

Thanks, that sounds better.

I'll add making packages to do this to my to do list. They should be pretty
easy to do, so there's a good chance I'll get to it soon. I'll add a comment
to the thread when I have something ready for review.
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[John5342]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:23, Bruno Wolff III br...@wolff.to wrote:
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:37:16 +0100,
  Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 08:09:51AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
  On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 14:26:39 +0100,
    Matthew Garrett mj...@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
  
   Or just add floppy-support and analog-joystick-support packages that
   include appropriate modprobe.conf fragments, and have documentation that
   instructs the user to install them.
 
  To make this more precise, woulf the appropriate way to do this would be to
  perhaps put floppy.conf or joystick.conf in /etc/modprode.d?
  With a post install script to run modprobe manually?

 That seems like it'd work.

 I'll need to test it. Right now I use explicit modprobe commands in
 rc.local, which isn't good for packages. I looked at modprobe.conf
 documentation and it doesn't seem like it uses those files to determine
 what to load, only what to do if it is loaded. So it may be that udev
 is really the correct place to do things.

 I'll investigate that. Once I know the right thing to do, the packaging
 should be pretty easy.

man modules-load.d looks promising too.

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Re: floppy support

[Felix Miata]

On 2011/08/30 08:40 (GMT+0200) drago01 composed:

 Felix Miata  wrote:

  ...OM...

 CD/DVD ?
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  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

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Re: floppy support

[Bill Nottingham]

Matthew Garrett (mj...@srcf.ucam.org) said: 
 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 02:50:10PM +0100, Tom Hughes wrote:
  On 30/08/11 14:23, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
  
  I'll need to test it. Right now I use explicit modprobe commands in
  rc.local, which isn't good for packages. I looked at modprobe.conf
  documentation and it doesn't seem like it uses those files to determine
  what to load, only what to do if it is loaded. So it may be that udev
  is really the correct place to do things.
  
  Or modules-load.d if you want to force load a module.
 
 Oops. Yes, that's what I meant.

Is there a reason that (at least for the one case) this wouldn't just
go in the joystick package?

Bill
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Re: floppy support

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:49:37AM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
 Matthew Garrett (mj...@srcf.ucam.org) said: 
  On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 02:50:10PM +0100, Tom Hughes wrote:
   Or modules-load.d if you want to force load a module.
  
  Oops. Yes, that's what I meant.
 
 Is there a reason that (at least for the one case) this wouldn't just
 go in the joystick package?

Joystick seems to be part of the default install (it handles USB devices 
as well as legacy ones), and we probably wouldn't want this by default.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 18:25 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Matthew Garrett wrote:
  ACPI turned out to be full of lies. The real problem is that machines
  will report a floppy controller even if they have no floppy drives
  attached, and the ACPI function that's supposed to return a list of
  drives usually returns a mixture of falsehoods and untruths. Merely
  havig a floppy controller is enough to get the floppy driver loaded,
  which then hangs for ages looking for a drive.
 
 I think it's sad that we're sacrificing hardware support for boot times.
 
 We should probe for everything by default. Users who don't have a floppy 
 drive and want to save some boot time can blacklist the driver manually.

It seem much more intelligent to add a package owners of floppies can
install, so that 99.9% of the others do not have to wait forever for no
reason.

Simo.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Kevin Kofler]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
 There's no way to get any feedback from the gameport driver as to (a)
 whether there's anything plugged in, or (b) what is plugged in. We could
 have the gameport driver automatically pull in analog but that'd
 probably break people doing midi or using some more specialised input
 device. It's a hard problem that only impacts a pretty tiny set of
 people, so it's prioritised somewhere below the hard problems that
 impact a pretty large set of people.

An Arch Linux user once pointed out to me that Arch (at the time) probed for 
analog joysticks using this udev rule:
SUBSYSTEM==pnp, ENV{MODALIAS}!=?*, ATTRS{id}==PNPb02f, 
RUN+=/lib/udev/load-modules.sh analog
(They have since dropped that rule in their trunk.) I don't know whether it 
makes any sense though. I presume this is just testing for the presence of a 
gameport without caring about what is connected, right?

Kevin Kofler

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 06:30:30PM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:

 An Arch Linux user once pointed out to me that Arch (at the time) probed for 
 analog joysticks using this udev rule:
 SUBSYSTEM==pnp, ENV{MODALIAS}!=?*, ATTRS{id}==PNPb02f, 
 RUN+=/lib/udev/load-modules.sh analog
 (They have since dropped that rule in their trunk.) I don't know whether it 
 makes any sense though. I presume this is just testing for the presence of a 
 gameport without caring about what is connected, right?

Right.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Lennart Poettering]

On Tue, 30.08.11 18:30, Kevin Kofler (kevin.kof...@chello.at) wrote:

 
 Matthew Garrett wrote:
  There's no way to get any feedback from the gameport driver as to (a)
  whether there's anything plugged in, or (b) what is plugged in. We could
  have the gameport driver automatically pull in analog but that'd
  probably break people doing midi or using some more specialised input
  device. It's a hard problem that only impacts a pretty tiny set of
  people, so it's prioritised somewhere below the hard problems that
  impact a pretty large set of people.
 
 An Arch Linux user once pointed out to me that Arch (at the time) probed for 
 analog joysticks using this udev rule:
 SUBSYSTEM==pnp, ENV{MODALIAS}!=?*, ATTRS{id}==PNPb02f, 
 RUN+=/lib/udev/load-modules.sh analog
 (They have since dropped that rule in their trunk.) I don't know whether it 
 makes any sense though. I presume this is just testing for the presence of a 
 gameport without caring about what is connected, right?

If the PNP device with the ID PNPb02f is an analog joystick port then
instead of hacking userspace rules like this the analog.ko kernel module
should just gain a modinfo alias for it like for example parport_pc has
for its PNP device ids. See modinfo parport_pc as an example.

Lennart

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 07:18:40PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
 On Tue, 30.08.11 18:30, Kevin Kofler (kevin.kof...@chello.at) wrote:
  An Arch Linux user once pointed out to me that Arch (at the time) probed 
  for 
  analog joysticks using this udev rule:
  SUBSYSTEM==pnp, ENV{MODALIAS}!=?*, ATTRS{id}==PNPb02f, 
  RUN+=/lib/udev/load-modules.sh analog
  (They have since dropped that rule in their trunk.) I don't know whether it 
  makes any sense though. I presume this is just testing for the presence of 
  a 
  gameport without caring about what is connected, right?
 
 If the PNP device with the ID PNPb02f is an analog joystick port then
 instead of hacking userspace rules like this the analog.ko kernel module
 should just gain a modinfo alias for it like for example parport_pc has
 for its PNP device ids. See modinfo parport_pc as an example.

The id is already present in ns558, which is the driver for the typical 
PC game port. However, this is only the driver for the controller, not 
for the joystick itself. In theory we could have the driver probe for a 
connected device and request_module(analog) if it finds something, but 
(a) that'd only work at boot, and (b) it'd be less than ideal if there's 
something other than a standard analog joystick connected.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2011-08-29 at 16:58 +0200, Jos Vos wrote:

 Don't let us all fall in the GNOME3 trap (assuming that all hardware
 now has accelerated graphics support, which is even more ridiculous,
 although GNOME3 has become useless for most people I know anyway).

GNOME 3 does not do that. It has an entire alternative shell - the
fallback mode - which exists expressly to support systems which cannot
run Shell.
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Re: floppy support

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 08/30/2011 09:02 AM, Chris Adams wrote:

 It isn't why I use floppies under Linux, but my mother's very expensive
 computerized embroidery machine uses floppies to transfer patterns.
 There are still things in the real world that exclusively use floppy
 disks, and they aren't going away as rapidly as some seem to think.


I feel your pain; a lot of perfectly good lab equipment has floppies 
too, but whenever practical, I'd recommend a USB floppy drive emulator 
from ipcas or http://www.rioc.us/ufr-usb-floppy-replacement.php or 
http://www.floppytousb.com/
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Kevin Kofler]

Simo Sorce wrote:
 It seem much more intelligent to add a package owners of floppies can
 install, so that 99.9% of the others do not have to wait forever for no
 reason.

This goes against the principle that Fedora should Just Work on any hardware 
it encounters if at all possible.

Kevin Kofler

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Re: floppy support

[Jef Spaleta]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Przemek Klosowski 
przemek.klosow...@nist.gov wrote:

 I feel your pain; a lot of perfectly good lab equipment has floppies
 too, but whenever practical, I'd recommend a USB floppy drive emulator
 from ipcas or http://www.rioc.us/ufr-usb-floppy-replacement.php or
 http://www.floppytousb.com/


I take it those usb based external floppy readers are auto-detected like
sane hardware should be?

-jef
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Re: floppy support

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 08/30/2011 03:18 PM, Jef Spaleta wrote:


 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Przemek Klosowski
 przemek.klosow...@nist.gov mailto:przemek.klosow...@nist.gov wrote:

 I feel your pain; a lot of perfectly good lab equipment has floppies
 too, but whenever practical, I'd recommend a USB floppy drive emulator
 from ipcas or http://www.rioc.us/ufr-usb-floppy-replacement.php or
 http://www.floppytousb.com/


 I take it those usb based external floppy readers are auto-detected like
 sane hardware should be?

They connect to the floppy cable and look like a floppy drive.
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 09:13:05PM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Simo Sorce wrote:
  It seem much more intelligent to add a package owners of floppies can
  install, so that 99.9% of the others do not have to wait forever for no
  reason.
 
 This goes against the principle that Fedora should Just Work on any hardware 
 it encounters if at all possible.

There's plenty of hardware that Fedora could work on but doesn't because 
the maintainers aren't willing to make the tradeoffs.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 21:13 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Simo Sorce wrote:
  It seem much more intelligent to add a package owners of floppies can
  install, so that 99.9% of the others do not have to wait forever for no
  reason.
 
 This goes against the principle that Fedora should Just Work on any hardware 
 it encounters if at all possible.

I guess you need to define 'Just Work', and 'if at all possible'.

Making boot hang for long periods can easily be seen as 'Not working
properly' and therefore make default floppy support 'not possible'.
At least this is the reasoning I see and agree with.

Simo.

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Re: floppy support

[Jef Spaleta]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Przemek Klosowski 
przemek.klosow...@nist.gov wrote:


 They connect to the floppy cable and look like a floppy drive.


Bah, I'd think you'd want to go the other way if you could get an external
usb based floppy reader which is autodetected on the usb bus.  Anything that
hangs off the onboard floppy controller is going to need some lovin.


-jef
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Re: floppy support

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 08/30/2011 03:36 PM, Jef Spaleta wrote:


 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Przemek Klosowski
 przemek.klosow...@nist.gov mailto:przemek.klosow...@nist.gov wrote:


 They connect to the floppy cable and look like a floppy drive.


 Bah, I'd think you'd want to go the other way if you could get an
 external usb based floppy reader which is autodetected on the usb bus.
 Anything that hangs off the onboard floppy controller is going to need
 some lovin.

Problem with the old equipment is that it often does not have USB or 
indeed predates USB
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Re: floppy support

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Jef Spaleta jspal...@gmail.com said:
 Bah, I'd think you'd want to go the other way if you could get an external
 usb based floppy reader which is autodetected on the usb bus.  Anything that
 hangs off the onboard floppy controller is going to need some lovin.

These are for embedded systems that use a standard PC-style floppy
controller.  Replace the floppy drive with something else that still
looks to the system like a regular floppy drive.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Simo Sorce s...@redhat.com said:
 Making boot hang for long periods can easily be seen as 'Not working
 properly' and therefore make default floppy support 'not possible'.
 At least this is the reasoning I see and agree with.

How many systems are there that hang forever when the floppy module is
loaded?  I have never seen that happen, on systems with or without
floppy drives, yet you seem to be saying it happens on vast numbers of
them (99.9% in an earlier message).

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 14:55 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
 Once upon a time, Simo Sorce s...@redhat.com said:
  Making boot hang for long periods can easily be seen as 'Not working
  properly' and therefore make default floppy support 'not possible'.
  At least this is the reasoning I see and agree with.
 
 How many systems are there that hang forever when the floppy module is
 loaded?  I have never seen that happen, on systems with or without
 floppy drives, yet you seem to be saying it happens on vast numbers of
 them (99.9% in an earlier message).

Don't put words in my mouth that I have never said please.

I said:
A) 99.9% of users do not needed the floppy anymore
B) I said hang for long periods and not forever, where here long
is of course relative to modern machine boot times.

A and B are not related of course, and that was clear from the context.

Simo.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Simo Sorce s...@redhat.com said:
 I said:
 A) 99.9% of users do not needed the floppy anymore
 B) I said hang for long periods and not forever, where here long
 is of course relative to modern machine boot times.

You said:

   It seem much more intelligent to add a package owners of floppies can
   install, so that 99.9% of the others do not have to wait forever for no
   reason.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-August/156261.html

To me, that reads as 99.9% of non-floppy owners have to wait forever.

In any case, instead of arguing semantics, can you answer my actual
question?  How many systems hang when floppy.ko is loaded?  If it is a
large number, it should be easy to point to lots of data.
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Re: floppy support

[Björn Persson]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Users who don't have a floppy 
 drive and want to save some boot time can blacklist the driver manually.

s/Us/Hack/ to make that sentence true.

Björn Persson


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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 15:12 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
 Once upon a time, Simo Sorce s...@redhat.com said:
  I said:
  A) 99.9% of users do not needed the floppy anymore
  B) I said hang for long periods and not forever, where here long
  is of course relative to modern machine boot times.
 
 You said:
 
It seem much more intelligent to add a package owners of floppies can
install, so that 99.9% of the others do not have to wait forever for no
reason.
 
 http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-August/156261.html
 
 To me, that reads as 99.9% of non-floppy owners have to wait forever.

Ok, reasonable misunderstanding, I didn't mean it that way, sorry.

 In any case, instead of arguing semantics, can you answer my actual
 question?  How many systems hang when floppy.ko is loaded?  If it is a
 large number, it should be easy to point to lots of data.

They do not 'hang', they just take longer to boot, sometimes a lot
longer. The point is that given most machines do not even ship with a
floppy drive anymore it seem entirely reasonable to spare the wait to
most users because they do not need that support anyway (and even most
of those who have a floppy driver do not use it ever). While for those
few that need it, then having to install a simple package to enable the
support by default seem sensible and good enough.

I don't think I have anything more to add to that.

Simo.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Simo Sorce s...@redhat.com said:
 They do not 'hang', they just take longer to boot, sometimes a lot
 longer.

How much longer?  How many such machines?  Again, I've booted systems
without floppy drives but with floppy support loaded, and I haven't seen
any significant hang.

Leaving known-working hardware unusable at install is just rude and
irritating when it is needed.  There should be good justification, not
just a bunch of developers don't use it anymore, so we don't think
anybody else needs it.
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Re: floppy support

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 08/30/2011 03:55 PM, Chris Adams wrote:

 How many systems are there that hang forever when the floppy module is
 loaded?  I have never seen that happen, on systems with or without
 floppy drives, yet you seem to be saying it happens on vast numbers of
 them (99.9% in an earlier message).

It's not really 'forever', it just seems like 'forever'---remember those 
sounds that go 'bzzut bzzzut... bzzut...' when the 
floppy drive does a head seek during floppy controller init at boot.
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Re: floppy support

[Tomasz Torcz]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 04:25:18PM -0400, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
 On 08/30/2011 03:55 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
 
  How many systems are there that hang forever when the floppy module is
  loaded?  I have never seen that happen, on systems with or without
  floppy drives, yet you seem to be saying it happens on vast numbers of
  them (99.9% in an earlier message).
 
 It's not really 'forever', it just seems like 'forever'---remember those 
 sounds that go 'bzzut bzzzut... bzzut...' when the 
 floppy drive does a head seek during floppy controller init at boot.


  No, it really takes 30÷45 seconds before floppy module timeouts after
access to /dev/fd0.  Seems like eternity, especially if you have
no other output on screen during this time.

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xmpp: zdzich...@chrome.pl God is more forgiving.

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[John5342]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 21:12, Chris Adams cmad...@hiwaay.net wrote:
 In any case, instead of arguing semantics, can you answer my actual
 question?  How many systems hang when floppy.ko is loaded?  If it is a
 large number, it should be easy to point to lots of data.

Ok, just some very approximate stats for a group of approximately 50
computers i used to run (this was about 2 years ago and with various
linux distributions but i doubt floppy support varies much). The
computers with floppy drives enabled in the BIOS even though there was
no actual drive attached took mostly between 2 and 20 seconds longer
to boot. 2 of them (probably very broken controllers) actually took 2
minutes longer to boot. These extra boot times are far from being the
end of the world but certainly not worth inflicting on everyone to
satisfy the rare use from a tiny proportion of users.

I may be way wide of the mark but if floppy drives were enabled either
on demand or as a service in systemd could the module perhaps be
loaded later on during boot and in parallel with the rest of the boot.
That would make any potential hang completely irrelevant.

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Re: floppy support

[Chris Jones]

The argument that some older hardware do not have USB support and require
floppy support is moot.

I have 3 PCs in total. 2 desktops and 1 file server. The 2 desktops run
Ubuntu/Linux and the server running BSD. The server is an old desktop system
that has had various upgrades and various transformations throughout its
life. But when I go back to its origins, it will be 10 years old now. And
even in its early beginnings, it still had full usb support. And effectively
having no 'real' use for floppies. Even though it did come with a floppy
drive ootb.

I see it all the time. Some older hardware still requires floppies... It
just seems like a generic defense statement for the fans of floppies and for
those who insist on using them for god knows what reason.
Any hardware that is true to that statement must be at least 15 years old
surely!
And for the cheap price of PCs these days, whether it is building your own
or grabbing an oem system, just upgrade to something that does have full usb
support.

USB sticks may be small and easy to lose, correct. But I don't know how many
times I've put several of mine through the washing machine and they still
continue to work. Try putting a floppy disk through the washing machine and
then try reading the data and see what happens.
And as far as losing them, they always turn up again. And for permanent
loss, I really don't care as I encrypt all my data when using usb sticks
anyway. And if I don't find it, for $10 I can easily get another 8GB anyway.


Regards

Chris Jones

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Re: floppy support

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Chris Jones chrisjo...@comcen.com.au said:
 I see it all the time. Some older hardware still requires floppies... It
 just seems like a generic defense statement for the fans of floppies and for
 those who insist on using them for god knows what reason.

Again, please stop trying to tell me what hardware to use.  I have run
into several situations where I _must_ use a floppy.  I don't want to,
and I've tried lots of other things first, but the floppy worked.

 Any hardware that is true to that statement must be at least 15 years old
 surely!

Hardly.  I have a 6 year old notebook that will not book from USB.

 And for the cheap price of PCs these days, whether it is building your own
 or grabbing an oem system, just upgrade to something that does have full usb
 support.

Feel free to PayPal me money for a new notebook.

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Re: floppy support

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:25 PM, Przemek Klosowski
przemek.klosow...@nist.gov wrote:
 On 08/30/2011 03:55 PM, Chris Adams wrote:

 How many systems are there that hang forever when the floppy module is
 loaded?  I have never seen that happen, on systems with or without
 floppy drives, yet you seem to be saying it happens on vast numbers of
 them (99.9% in an earlier message).

 It's not really 'forever', it just seems like 'forever'---remember those
 sounds that go 'bzzut bzzzut... bzzut...' when the
 floppy drive does a head seek during floppy controller init at boot.
I hope no software is still doing this - that was idiotic 10 years
ago, let alone now.  (The purpose of the seek is to detect drives that
can support only double density, i.e. 360K, 5.25 disks, not high
density, i.e. 1.2M disks.  It doesn't do anything useful for 3.5
drives.)
   Mirek
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Re: floppy support

[Jef Spaleta]

2011/8/30 Miloslav Trmač m...@volny.cz

 I hope no software is still doing this - that was idiotic 10 years
 ago, let alone now.  (The purpose of the seek is to detect drives that
 can support only double density, i.e. 360K, 5.25 disks, not high
 density, i.e. 1.2M disks.  It doesn't do anything useful for 3.5
 drives.)



bah you 3.5 inch floppy elitists!!  I have an original wolfenstein 3-D
on 5.25 '' floppy...its its original sleeve...that I still use.  How dare
you suggest that I give up my 5.25 inch floppy.  Its actually floppy
unlike those hard plastic 3.5 inch cases.


-jefNow if you wanted to suggest we finally drop support for the 8 inch
floppy drives, than I would definitely support that.spaleta
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Re: floppy support

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 1:49 AM, Jef Spaleta jspal...@gmail.com wrote:


 2011/8/30 Miloslav Trmač m...@volny.cz

 I hope no software is still doing this - that was idiotic 10 years
 ago, let alone now.  (The purpose of the seek is to detect drives that
 can support only double density, i.e. 360K, 5.25 disks, not high
 density, i.e. 1.2M disks.  It doesn't do anything useful for 3.5
 drives.)

 bah you 3.5 inch floppy elitists!!  I have an original wolfenstein 3-D
 on 5.25 '' floppy...its its original sleeve...that I still use.  How dare
 you suggest that I give up my 5.25 inch floppy.  Its actually floppy
 unlike those hard plastic 3.5 inch cases.
I wouldn't dare to say anything against a Wolfenstein 3-D medium.
That's fine, any 5.25 floppy _disk_ is fine.

The seek is there to detect the double-density _drive_ that was last
shipped in PC XT: PC AT already had a high-density drive.  Wikipedia
tells me that the seek is there to detect hardware that became
obsolete in 1984.
   Mirek
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Re: floppy support

[Jef Spaleta]

2011/8/30 Miloslav Trmač m...@volny.cz

 The seek is there to detect the double-density _drive_ that was last
 shipped in PC XT: PC AT already had a high-density drive.  Wikipedia
 tells me that the seek is there to detect hardware that became
 obsolete in 1984.

 you take the fun out of everything.

But now I'm going to hunt around and see if I can find one of those here at
the U. that might still work.

-jef
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Re: floppy support

[Michael Ekstrand]

On 08/30/2011 06:30 PM, Chris Jones wrote:
 I see it all the time. Some older hardware still requires floppies...
 It just seems like a generic defense statement for the fans of floppies
 and for those who insist on using them for god knows what reason.
 Any hardware that is true to that statement must be at least 15 years
 old surely!
 And for the cheap price of PCs these days, whether it is building your
 own or grabbing an oem system, just upgrade to something that does have
 full usb support.

I am not defending floppies - I think the current approach of ship the
module, but don't load it by default is quite sensible - but there is
an additional use case: perhaps the machine itself does not need
floppies, but being able use it to prepare floppies for another machine
that does (e.g. some old piece of electronics that can save data to
floppy, a dedicated-use computer for running scientific experiments, etc.).

- Michael

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Re: floppy support

[Michael Cronenworth]

On 08/30/2011 06:40 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
 Again, please stop trying to tell me what hardware to use.

Manufacturers will tell you what hardware to use. Very few manufacturers 
still produce drives and media. Sony has stopped[1] as of last year.

So, if it takes the death of your floppy drive to change your mind (and 
your mother's embroidery, wow, what a stretch there) then I hope death 
meets it soon.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8646699.stm

P.S. I think I'm done with the Internet for this week. I've made a 
bike-shedding thread instead a bike-shedding thread.
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Kevin Kofler]

Chris Adams wrote:
 Leaving known-working hardware unusable at install is just rude and
 irritating when it is needed.  There should be good justification, not
 just a bunch of developers don't use it anymore, so we don't think
 anybody else needs it.

+1

Kevin Kofler

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Re: floppy support

[Kevin Kofler]

Michael Cronenworth wrote:
 Manufacturers will tell you what hardware to use. Very few manufacturers
 still produce drives and media. Sony has stopped[1] as of last year.

Unless the EU bans them (like those standard incandescence lightbulbs), I 
don't think floppies will become completely unavailable all that soon. (And 
unlike for those old lightbulbs, I don't think there's any reason for 
politicians to ban floppies.)

Kevin Kofler

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Re: floppy support

[Kevin Kofler]

Björn Persson wrote:

 Kevin Kofler wrote:
 Users who don't have a floppy
 drive and want to save some boot time can blacklist the driver manually.
 
 s/Us/Hack/ to make that sentence true.

No. Users who want to tweak their system to the point of shaving a few 
seconds off their boot times should be able to RTFM!

On the other hand, users who just want the hardware in their computer to 
actually WORK shouldn't be expected to. (With the current setup, they are, 
which is why it is entirely backwards!)

Kevin Kofler

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Re: floppy support

[Bruno Wolff III]

Below is a proposed specfile for the floppy case. (Analog joystick would be
very similar.) I haven't tested the package for functionality yet, but did
test it with rpmbuild and rpmlint. Is this what we want? Is this ready
for a formal review?

Name: floppy-support  
Version:1.0
Release:1%{?dist}
Summary:Load floppy driver at boot time
Group: System Environment/Kernel


License:MIT
# The package is built just using this specfile.
#URL:
#Source0:

Requires(post): module-init-tools

BuildArch:  noarch

%description
By default the floppy driver is not loaded at boot time. Installing this
package will load the floppy driver as part of the install and will set
things so that it will be loaded during future boots.


%prep
#No setup, since no source outside the specfile.



%install
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/modules-load.d
echo floppy  $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/modules-load.d/floppy.conf


%files
%{_libdir}/modules-load.d/floppy.conf

%post
/sbin/modprobe floppy

%changelog
* Tue Aug 30 2011 Bruno Wolff III br...@wolff.to 1.0-1
- Initial package creation
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Michael Cronenworth]

Chris Adams wrote:
 Why does util-linux have two floppy disk formatters (/usr/bin/floppy and
 /usr/sbin/fdformat)?

Why does it have any floppy tools any more? The kernel maintainers don't 
support the floppy module and the module hasn't been auto-loaded for 
several releases.
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Jon Ciesla]

 Chris Adams wrote:
 Why does util-linux have two floppy disk formatters (/usr/bin/floppy and
 /usr/sbin/fdformat)?

 Why does it have any floppy tools any more? The kernel maintainers don't
 support the floppy module and the module hasn't been auto-loaded for
 several releases.
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Because there are still people with floppy drives?

-J

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Jos Vos]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 09:44:33AM -0500, Jon Ciesla wrote:

 Because there are still people with floppy drives?

+1

It's ridiculous to think that older HW doesn't exist because systems
with that HW are not sold anymore (I don't even know id the latter
is true at all -- some special purpose systems might still have it).

We just have to wait till people come up with the argument that serial
or parallel ports don't exist anymore.

Don't let us all fall in the GNOME3 trap (assuming that all hardware
now has accelerated graphics support, which is even more ridiculous,
although GNOME3 has become useless for most people I know anyway).

Sorry, I couldn't resist...

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Re: floppy support

[Michael Cronenworth]

Jos Vos wrote:
 We just have to wait till people come up with the argument that serial
 or parallel ports don't exist anymore.

No. You're making an apples to orange comparison. Just like Jon has done 
this whole thread.

This bike shedding as gone on long enough.

Remove ddate. Karel, you're upstream. Do it.

P.S. Your argument will be moot when the kernel drops the floppy module.
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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Karel Zak]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 09:37:37AM -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
 Chris Adams wrote:
  Why does util-linux have two floppy disk formatters (/usr/bin/floppy and
  /usr/sbin/fdformat)?
 
 Why does it have any floppy tools any more?

 because we still support floppy devices?

 The kernel maintainers don't 
 support the floppy module and the module hasn't been auto-loaded for 
 several releases.

 Does it mean that modprobe floppy does not work? 

Karel

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Re: floppy support

[Jon Ciesla]

 Jos Vos wrote:
 We just have to wait till people come up with the argument that serial
 or parallel ports don't exist anymore.

 No. You're making an apples to orange comparison. Just like Jon has done
 this whole thread.

 This bike shedding as gone on long enough.

Playing devil's advocate != bikeshedding.  But, I agree that this
discussion is aging rapidly.

 Remove ddate. Karel, you're upstream. Do it.

Now *this* makes sense.  I never advocated ddate being preserved in lucite
forevermore.  I just wanted a sane reason to deviate from upstream.  if
upstream drops it, the point is moot, and I think that's fine.

 P.S. Your argument will be moot when the kernel drops the floppy module.

Is there actually a plan for this to happen?  Curious, not arguing here.

-J
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Re: floppy support

[Dave Jones]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 10:31:09AM -0500, Jon Ciesla wrote:
 
   P.S. Your argument will be moot when the kernel drops the floppy module.
  
  Is there actually a plan for this to happen?  Curious, not arguing here.
 
Not any time soon.

Dave

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Kevin Kofler]

Karel Zak wrote:

 On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 09:37:37AM -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
 The kernel maintainers don't
 support the floppy module and the module hasn't been auto-loaded for
 several releases.
 
  Does it mean that modprobe floppy does not work?

No, it means that (unless this was recently fixed) you have to modprobe it 
manually (e.g. from rc.local) because nothing bothers trying to modprobe it 
for you anymore. IMHO, this is really broken, but the bug reports about it 
were ignored or declared NOTABUG.

Similarily, analog joystick support (yes, those joysticks you plug on the 
MIDI ports of those old sound cards) also has to be modprobed manually.

And yes, I have all that stuff plugged on this machine. I barely ever use 
it, but that doesn't mean I don't want it to work…

Kevin Kofler

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Re: floppy support (was: [HEADS UP] remove ddate(1) command from rawhide)

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Kevin Kofler kevin.kof...@chello.at said:
 No, it means that (unless this was recently fixed) you have to modprobe it 
 manually (e.g. from rc.local) because nothing bothers trying to modprobe it 
 for you anymore. IMHO, this is really broken, but the bug reports about it 
 were ignored or declared NOTABUG.

It is very irritating, since I only use floppies when I really need to,
and usually I've upgraded the system (I typically do clean installs)
since the last time.  I always have to stop and manually configure the
floppy drive again.

For a while, USB floppy drives got correctly configured when you plugged
them in (a udev rule was added to get /dev/floppy links and ownership),
but that was removed somewhere along the line.  I own the package for
formatting floppies in USB drives (ufiformat), and it is also irritating
when I go test it for new releases.  With changes over time, I don't
know how to get the device nodes with the correct access for the desktop
user anymore, and I figure if somebody went to the trouble of removing
the udev rules, there's not much point in asking to have them added
back.

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I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.
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Re: floppy support

[Michael Cronenworth]

On 08/29/2011 10:22 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
 It is very irritating, since I only use floppies when I really need to,

Is this due to the need to boot into DOS to run a firmware utility or 
something similar? If so, you can create a bootable, DOS USB flash 
drive. I haven't had a need for a floppy disk in years.
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Re: floppy support

[Chris Jones]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Michael Cronenworth m...@cchtml.comwrote:

 On 08/29/2011 10:22 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
  It is very irritating, since I only use floppies when I really need to,

 Is this due to the need to boot into DOS to run a firmware utility or
 something similar? If so, you can create a bootable, DOS USB flash
 drive. I haven't had a need for a floppy disk in years.


I can't see any reason for floppies these days considering their extreme
price per data unit as opposed to usb memory.

I don't flash much these days. And for times when I feel the need to, I go
about it by whatever other means is necessary to avoid anything to do with
floppies.

That's not to say that the Linux kernel should not support floppy drives.
That's an entirely different discussion really.


Regards

Chris Jones

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