Bug#375395: [Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#375395: cupsys: Printer stopped working after upgrade

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Wed, 28 Jun 2006, Roger Leigh wrote:
> I just installed discover on my i386 test system, and it didn't load
> lp.  I rebooted it to see what happened at startup, and it didn't load
> lp then, either.

Please file a bug against discover, it has to auto-detect the need for lp
and other very common protocol drivers.

> In a way, the fact that we have "lost" the facility to autoload
> modules when the device node is opened, despite the existence of the
> hotplug/udev/discover tools, is a usability problem.  A lot of

We never lost it, we just are not doing our job right yet, I think.

1. We now have proper hardware auto-detection and discovery, but it is not
quite there yet (discover).  This is fixable, so let's fix it :)

2. We now have to create the device nodes at runtime or boot-time if we need
them for kernel module auto-load, but we have not awaken to that fact yet.

I'd like to see a proper fix for both issues. Doing it right in (1) makes
(2) mostly not needed, and (1) is probably the long-term solution.

I'd fix (2) doing this:
  1. Write a small <autodetectable driver> -> <protocol driver> table,
     in a dir.d-style place so that packages can extend it.

  2. Have that table create device inodes or load the protocol driver
     module when the autodetectable driver is loaded.

  (or do the above using udev scripts, it doesn't really matter).

The udev package itself would be a good place to do (2), I supose.  This is
different from abusing udev from one or two packages, because we would be
deploying it as a general solution for an async userspace problem, which IS
in udev's charter to be an enabler of.

And it does NOT, in any way, shape or form, mean that (1) should not be
fixed.  Discover is to load "lp", and that's it.

What do you guys think?

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh