esc by default?

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 11:44 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 11:26 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-10-04 at 20:39 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > > That's an argument for having it on the install media, but not an
> > > argument to install it by default.
> > 
> > Bogus. Extend this argument to other device drivers etc. and you pretty
> > soon have a system that won't install / work anywhere.
> 
> extend it in the other direction and pretty soon you have a system that
> won't be able to fit on any media, anywhere.
> 
> I think the point we're making here is that we need to find a happy
> balance. I think smart cards are obscure enough to not include them by
> default.

Maybe. But it shouldn't have to be that way; smart cards (or anything
where you verify more than one thing about the user (e.g. the classic
something you a) have; b) know; c) are) are inherently more secure than
just passwords and SSH keys. Hence, I think we should be interested in
getting this working. Same for thinkfinger; people are doing very good
work at integrating this into the distro.

(Heck, if I'm a big company interested in this I should be able to
participate in the Fedora project and get my stuff into the distro so it
Just Works(tm) out of the box. Maybe even offer some or all Fedora
developers a smart card. Just a thought.)

But you're right; it's about balance; there's a couple of kernel drivers
we don't ship because they're just too obscure. Or they're too buggy. Or
too bloated. Whatever. Ideally our OS should be able to detect the
hardware and properly request for the driver / enabling software to be
installed (clearly, this won't work for kernel drivers now that kmod's
are banned but there's a lot of other stuff in userspace).

(I do think, however, that pscs-lite and esc should be installed by
default as soon they've fixed their resource consumption issues; at
least until our OS is smart enough to detect what RPM's to install when
we see the hardware [1])

     David

[1] : e.g. modalias; the package will have a
Provides: usb:v413Cp8103d2422dcE0dsc01dp01icFEisc01ip00