Re: "Fastest Linux of the world", hardware detection, X11 config
On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 01:32:58PM -0400, Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> was heard to say:
> Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > Debian has a tendency, as a project, to want to assemble a huge
> > collection of programs that can be shoveled onto the user's hard drive.
> > We don't generally do a lot of cross-package integration beyond making
> > sure that packages are basically functional when you install them.
>
> I must disagree. menu, info files registration, document registration
> via various tools, emacs script integration, ifupdown scripts that
> extend the capabilities of /etc/network/interfaces, ppp hooks, logcheck
> ignore files, sgml/xml catalog registration, mime, all these go above
> and beyond making a package basically functional and contribute to
> debian being a well integrated system.
Most of those existed when I started using Debian (the obvious
exceptions are interface scripts and xml catalogs, which are certainly
great things to have). menu was stagnant for years, and seems to be
basically ignored by the new desktops; doc-base is dead as far as I know.
There is an effort at unifying font configuration, but I've never been
able to get it to work properly on any of my systems.
When I started using Debian in '98, I had the impression integration
was important...but many of the new packages we've added since then don't
seem to do very much in the way of integrating with the rest of the system.
KDE and Gnome are especially bad this way, maybe because they have their
hands full just integrating with themselves.
> > So, for instance, I can count 5 tools off the top of my head in Debian
> > that perform some sort of hardware detection (including the kernel
> > itself!), and there are probably more. One of them is the hardware
> > detection software that Red Hat itself uses! However, the install procedure
> > doesn't know about them; they aren't used to configure X
>
> X config doesn't use _all_ of them. It does use discover, read-edid, and
> mdetect. As to the install procedure:
If it does, I haven't noticed; I still have to manually configure my
video card, monitor size, and mouse type even on new Sarge/unstable
installations.
> > Debian won't have decent support for adapting to the user's hardware
> > until we see a more collaborative spirit in the Project...and at present
> > things seem to be tending in rather the other direction, at least on
> > this list.
>
> Maybe you're unaware that the debian-installer project has created an
> installer for Debian that does full hardware detection (except X). FWIW,
> we use discover for hardware detection, along with hotplug on the
> installed system. There's a vast amount of integration and collaboration
> going on over on debian-boot and we'd not be able to do a lot of it
> without the cooperation of numerous developers in the project at large.
> For example:
I'm not trying to belittle what the installer team does; it was a huge
improvement the last time I used it. (although, as I mentioned above,
I've never seen X autodetection work properly and yes, I didn't realize
that it was supposed to work) hotplug and discover are great for
loading kernel modules, but a lot of other software has to be configured
by hand, even though I'm pretty sure the information it wants is available
from the autodetection systems.
I suppose I should be happy with the progress we've made since you had
to enter your sound card's IO ports by hand; I'm just a bit frustrated
because I recently set up a number of systems and was surprised at how
much stuff is still a matter of hand-copying information from the output
of one program to the input of another program.
> > [0] by which I mean that if you have two drives, it'll only look for
> > audio CDs in the first one.
>
> Maybe you should file a bug report?
Maybe.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| We are Debian of Borg. |
| You will be packaged. |
| Resistance is futile. |
\----------------- The Turtle Moves! -- http://www.lspace.org ----------------/
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