Re: RFA: acpi-support -- glue layer for translating laptop buttons, plus legacy suspend support

[Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no>]

Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> Le jeudi 16 avril 2009 à 15:06 +0200, Bjørn Mork a écrit :
>> >> a) laptop keys remapped or disappearing (might be caused by the driver -
>> >>    I don't know)
>> >
>> > Yes, they are remapped to the standard XF86* names, so that applications
>> > configuring shortcuts can have sensible defaults.
>> 
>> So you justify breaking existing setups by claiming the new
>> configuration is more "sensible".  How many times?  How often?
>
> If you know how to homogenize keycodes between different keyboard models
> without actually changing the keycodes, good for you, but I don’t. 
>
> Also, do you prefer configuring a keycode named “0xae” or
> “XF86AudioLowerVolume”?

I prefer non-broken defaults. hal defaults are broken.  No, the keys are
not always mapped to  standard XF86* names.  They are sometimes mapped
into the blue.

See e.g.  bug #504643, which explains my disappearing keys. Finding it
took some time, since stupid me thought "regrep KEY_RADIO /usr/share/hal".
would reveal any hal related problems.

This bug will bite every ThinkPad-user when /proc/acpi/event is removed
and we are forced to replace acpid functionality (already so in the
latest squeeze kernels).  And the cause is a simple case of a broken
default key remapping, reported more than 5 months ago. Open through
several new releases of hal-info.

You don't seriously beleive that I'm going to trust hal while it's in a
state like this, do you?

>> >> b) unwanted auto-mounting
>> >
>> > HAL will not do auto-mounting by itself. Some user-level daemon must be
>> > listening for events and requesting the actual mount.
>> 
>> The auto-mount support in hal is unwanted even without such daemons.
>> Continously polling all removable storage is a very bad default IMHO.
>> And why do it if there's no daemon listening for the events anyway?
>
> You’re mixing apples and oranges.

I'm sure you're right.  You see, there is no documentation for the
oranges, which may have made me assume they are fruit just like the
apples.

The hal default "polling removable disks" is annoying, useless, and an
example of bad hal design.  You may of course continue to ignore this by
claiming that I don't know what I'm talking about.  Unfortunately, it
won't do much more that continue to document hal as a dead-end with a
big "STAY AWAY!" warning sign.

You might as well implement a popup asking the user if (s)he is present
every 30 seconds.  I'm sure it would be very useful for hal to know, and
it woulb be only slightly more annoying than the disk polling.

Yes, I do know that the most annoying features can be disabled.  My
concerns are the bad Debian default values, not the features themselves,
combined with forcing these packages on the user.  There's absolutely no
excuse for forcing every X user to accept all the bogus key remapping in
hal-info.



Bjørn