Re: "Fastest Linux of the world", hardware detection, X11 config
On Thursday 15 July 2004 20:58, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 01:32:58PM -0400, Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> was
Hello,
>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.
Also we should mention the debconf and the debhelper suites as great and
_unique_ system integrators. I personally can not recall of any systems
having such or even similar infrastructures as these. Also nobody has menu
package as debian's as far as I know.
> 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,
I think the detection and configuration as X is not a debian-installer task,
but X packages themselves, e.g. like dexconf should be extended far beyond
relaying on debconf database values till the X software (the upstream) can
decect and configure itself reliably.
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