Why Elektra is the wrong approach (Was Re: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management)

Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net
Mon Apr 3 15:25:46 UTC 2006


Le Lun 3 avril 2006 17:11, Avi Alkalay a écrit :

> What if my mother only wants to install a new multimedia keyboard in
> her standalone Linux box? She'll have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf? Or
> wait for the distribution's HW detection tool to know how to handle
> that? Clearly the best solutions is to let the HW provider know that
> X.org configurations are pretty predictable in any distribution, and
> it just have to provide some scripts to precisely integrate itself in
> X.org configuration schema, instead of having to "compile", understand
> and regenerate /etc/X11/xorg.conf only to install itself.

Avi,

I agree with much of what you've written lately but here you're back in
lala-lala land.

You can't have several entities sharing the same object (here entities are
xorg and your mythical keyboard manufacturer). It *always* ends bad
because the first reflex of the keyboard manufacturer will be to
"canonalize" the conf to something it tested (and testing is expensive so
don't count on a complex canonic setup), lower various tuneables to
workaround its product bugs, and generally destroy the settings the
mythical mouse manufacturer put in the configuration.

Having central clearinghouses that mediate between actors (LKML, xorg,
distributions) is a very powerful feature of Linux distributions (you'll
note ms has been increasingly centralising driver handling in the last
years for this very same reason). Your manufacturer should push its
changes upstream instead of expending resources trying to workaround the
system.

In other words, your "fix" is worse than the "problem".

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailho




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