What the status of the unwritten rule "install all device drivers by default"

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Thu Apr 24 09:44:38 UTC 2008


On 24.04.2008 11:28, Lubomir Kundrak wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-04-24 at 09:47 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> In the past we IIRC had unwritten rules like "disk space is cheap thus 
>> install all device drivers by default" and "enable all device drivers by 
>> default in the configs if that doesn't do any harm, as that way devices 
>> will 'just work' without any manual configuration by the user".
>> Do we still follow those unwritten rules? I just installed a HP 
>> printer/scanner on a system with a fresh Fedora 9 preview install and 
>> had to manually install the libsane-hpaio package to make the scanner 
>> work. Is that intended behavior or would we consider this a bug?
> I'm wondering whether we'll have some "hal - PackageKit - something"
> magic to provide you with a nice notification bubble that suggest you
> click a link to install the required package.

The idea was brought up multiple times in the past on this list IIRC, 
but often was shot down with "disk space is cheap; it's better to just 
install all drivers/packages by default and most people will be happy".

And I have to agree with this option -- (Open)Suse provides such a 
function in Yast, but it multiple times drove me mad in the past years 
when I had to look up the install-media (which of course often was not 
at hand and nowhere to be found) or get a internet connection running 
(which requires some work as well and sometimes is hard or impossible 
when you are traveling¹) when configuring a device for the first time.

Most drivers are part of the kernel or installed by default in any case 
-- thus I tend to say it's less work for everyone to just install the 
other drivers as well by default instead of working out a (complicated?) 
framework to install drivers on demand.

CU
knurd

¹ -- okay, that's unlikely in the case of a scanner, but for network 
hardware it's a real problem




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